What Does Twitter Tell Us About Tourists\u27 Mobility Behavior? A Case Study on Tourists in The Netherlands and Belgium

Social media has made a big impact on the tourism industry. Tourists are increasingly sharing their personal experiences of a particular touristic site scene using social media. Studying tourists’ movement behavior should support the tourism industry with more statistics and information regarding tourism demand. It would also provide policy makers with another data source on tourists and their movements. In this paper, we propose a set of heuristics to identify tourists on Twitter. We also utilized both textual contents and geolocation information of Tweets posted by tourists visiting The Netherlands and Belgium to provide a near real scenario for the tourists’ travel route made during their stay in The Netherlands and Belgium. Finally, we induce and visualize some useful statistics regarding the tourists’ visiting behavior in The Netherlands and Belgium