Understanding the tourist mobility using GPS: How similar are the tourists?

The emergence of the motilities paradigm places tourism at the core of social sciences. Thus, understanding the tourist mobility is fundamental for both tourism management practice and tourism research. This study proposes a heuristic method that combines dynamic time warping and the earth mover's distance, to accurately measure the similarity of tourist trajectories. A case study at Xiamen University Campus was conducted to estimate the performance of our proposed method, and the results of two experiments suggest that our method has better measurement accuracy and noise resistance than current methods. Furthermore, our method has vast potential applications in the fields of personalized service, tourism attraction marketing and management.