Understanding the tourist mobility using GPS: Where is the next place?

•This paper explores tourist mobility using GPS at the level of tourist attraction.•A heuristic method is proposed to predict the next location of individual tourist.•A case study at the Summer Palace is conducted to evaluate the method's performance.•We further explore the potential applications of the proposed method.

Understanding the mobility of tourists plays a fundamental role in the administration and design of tourist destinations, planning of on-site movement and marketing of attractions. In this paper, we focus on how to accurately predict the tourist's next location within a given attraction. A heuristic method based on data mining is proposed, which considers the trajectory of a focal tourist and the movements of past visitors. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, a case study was conducted at the Summer Palace in Beijing, China. We collected movement information from tourists using GPS tracking technology, and the results of an independent samples t-test indicate that the proposed method indeed performs significantly better than existing methods. We further explore the potential applications of the proposed method. Our results significantly contribute to enhancing the level of personalized location-based service, tourist attraction administration, and real-time crowd control.