Tourist GPS Tracking

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.