A Reformulated Directional Bias of Tourist Flow

Abstract

Conventional directional bias is unable to identify the interactions and relationships between emitted tourist flows and attracted tourist flows, while arguably contradicting the actual emitting/attracting functions for any region, especially in systematic analysis. A newly coined FTR (Functional Tourism Region) based on a regional perspective and a new directional bias derived from conceptual, geographical and technical contexts are proposed. This paper proposes that the new directional bias is defined in terms of two characteristics. The first is the pointing of tourist flow as well as its pointing types, and the second is the inertial state of pointing. Pointing types are classified into three basic types: city-pointing, seasidepointing and sun-lust-pointing. A case study of Chinese rural residents' domestic overnight travel pattern demonstrates that the new definition of directional bias may yield useful qualitative and quantitative information. Results indicate that city-pointing and seaside-pointing constitute the main pattern, while sun-lust-pointing increasingly contributes to the evolution of the whole tourist flow system. Increasing regional disparity is also detected in that China's eastern economic belt continuously enjoys tourism profits. Finally, it is postulated that the new directional bias of tourist flow can also be applied to other non-work flows that also have origins and destinations.

Analyzing the structure of tourism destination network based on digital footprints: taking Guilin, China as a case

“…A pro-cyclical behavior is found in international tourist flow and change of these cycles is sharper than evolvement of world economy and exports of other goods and service (David and María, 2012). Tourist flow on regional efficacy plays an active role in invisible asset, infrastructure and spatial spillover (Marrocu and Paci, 2011), and it is found that there exists to grow regional disparity in China's eastern economic belt as the area continuously enjoys the tourism margin (Zhong et al , 2011). Tourism flows around the world should be estimated on a macro scale or in terms of mobility between destinations (Shao et al , 2020).…”

Study on Tourism Flow Network Patterns on May Day Holiday

“…Most research into spatial and temporal tourism flow has focused on the "tourists-excursion-scenic spot" pattern. Some interrelated studies have focused on the spatial patterns [17][18][19], spatio-temporal evolution [20][21][22][23], and influencing factors [24,25] of tourism flow and the demand for tourism [26,27]. Such research has significantly helped to clarify the concept of tourism flow, constructing the research directions and paradigm for tourism flow.…”

Rank–size distribution and spatio-temporal dynamics of tourist flows to China’s cities

“…To implement sustainable development, it is important to analyse and investigate the rank–size distribution and hierarchy of cities at the temporal and spatial scales (Xu and Harriss, 2010). In recent years, researchers have studied the spatial distributions of tourist flows in China from a variety of perspectives (Bowden, 2003; Wen and Sinha, 2009; Yang and Wang, 2014; Yang and Wong, 2013; Zhang et al, 2011; Zhong et al, 2011). In the tourism field, several studies have shown that the numbers of tourists visiting specific countries and cities in a given year follow Zipf’s law (Blackwell et al, 2011; Ulubasoglu and Hazari, 2004; Yang et al, 2006; Yang et al, 2007).…”