Increasing Smartphone-based Travel Survey Participants

This study discusses two smartphone-based travel surveys in Kumamoto, Japan, and investigates methods to increase the number of participants in smartphone-based surveys. The first was a visitors’ behavior survey conducted in downtown Kumamoto, which collected 1,086 samples. The second was a truck floating car survey. We offered an incentive and several recruitment methods to increase the sample size. The objectives of this study are to demonstrate the difference between reward effects and effective recruitment methods among different participants. Analysis of the visitors’ survey reveals that young people prefer rewards, while some aged people think that rewards do not matter.