Tourist activity analysis by leveraging mobile social media data

Approaches to traditional travel diary construction rely on tourist participation and manual recording; hence, they are not only time-consuming but also limited in the scale and the number of samples. Online social network platforms have been used as alternative data sources for capturing the movements and travel patterns of tourists at a large scale. However, they fail to provide detailed contextual information on tourist activities for further analysis. In this paper, we present a new approach to travel diary construction based on the venue check-in data available in mobile social media with rich information on locations, time, and activities. Our case study focuses on the inbound tourism in Hong Kong using a data set composed of 17,355 check-ins generated by 600 tourists. We demonstrate how the proposed travel diary can provide useful practical implications for applications in location management, transportation management, impact management, and tourist experience promotion among others.