Compare methods

	Tourist GPS Tracking	Destination Network Analysis
Field	Tourism	Tourism
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2007	2008
Originator	Noam Shoval & Michal Isaacson	Noel Scott, Rodolfo Baggio & Chris Cooper
Type	Spatio-temporal data-collection and analysis pipeline for tourist movement	Network-analytic pipeline for destination stakeholder and inter-organizational structure
Seminal source	Shoval, N., & Isaacson, M. (2007). Tracking tourists in the digital age. Annals of Tourism Research, 34(1), 141-159.	Scott, N., Baggio, R., & Cooper, C. (2008). Network Analysis and Tourism: From Theory to Practice. Channel View Publications. ISBN: 9781845410872
Aliases	GPS Visitor Tracking, Tourist Movement Tracking, Spatio-Temporal Visitor Tracking, Advanced Tracking of Tourist Mobility	Tourism Network Analysis, Destination Stakeholder Network Analysis, Inter-Organizational Tourism Network Analysis, Tourism Destination Network Mapping
Related	3	3
Summary	Tourist GPS tracking is a spatio-temporal research pipeline that records where and when visitors move within a destination by equipping consenting tourists with GPS loggers or smartphone trackers and then reconstructing their trajectories. Introduced into mainstream tourism research by Noam Shoval and Michal Isaacson, whose 2007 Annals of Tourism Research paper laid out both the data-collection methodology and the analytic toolkit, the approach replaced unreliable recall-based diaries with continuous, objective position fixes. Their 2010 book consolidated the field, and McKercher and Lau showed how the recovered trajectories reveal a rich typology of movement patterns within a destination. The method couples careful field deployment with trajectory cleaning, stop-and-move segmentation, and spatial aggregation to map the geography and rhythm of visitor activity.	Destination network analysis treats a tourism destination as a network of interconnected stakeholders, firms, public agencies, intermediaries, and community actors, and studies its structure with the tools of social network analysis. The approach was consolidated by Noel Scott, Rodolfo Baggio, and Chris Cooper, whose 2008 book Network Analysis and Tourism: From Theory to Practice argued that a destination's competitiveness and capacity to coordinate depend not only on individual businesses but on the web of relationships that links them. By mapping who collaborates, exchanges information, or refers business to whom, the analysis reveals how cohesive a destination is, which organizations occupy central or brokering positions, and how the destination decomposes into sub-communities, providing an evidence base for destination governance and management.