GPS Traking and Surveys Analysis of Tourists' Spatio-Temporal Behaviour. The case of Alghero
Résumé
“Know thy tourists” is a useful maxim for any smart local government official or destination manager responsible for tourism policies. For that, position tracking technologies developed in the last decade are a valuable addition to the traditional toolbox for data collection, as they offer the opportunity to gather a great amount of unprecedented information on tourists behaviour in space and time (Shoval and Isaacson2007; Shoval et al. 2014).Until recently the most common way to study tourists’ behaviours in time and space were various methods of diary (re)construction (Shoval et al. 2014). And also, even if methods for surveying and analysing spatio-temporal behaviour are, of course, becoming highly developed in transportation research and in social sciences in general, comparatively little attention was being paid to the spatial and temporal behaviour of tourists, and systematic studies taking advantage of the technological developments offered by thehigh precision position tracking are still relatively few (Shoval and Isaacson 2007; Shoval et al. 2014, De Cantis et al. 2016, Sacerdotti et al. 2011).