Spatial and Temporal Characteristics of Urban Tourism Travel by Taxi—A Case Study of Shenzhen

Tourism networks are an important research part of tourism geography. Despite the significance of transportation in shaping tourism networks, current studies have mainly focused on the “daily behavior” of urban travel at the expense of tourism travel, which has been regarded as an “exceptional behavior”. To fill this gap, this study proposes a framework for exploring the spatial and temporal characteristics of urban tourism travel by taxi. We chose Shenzhen, a densely populated mega-city in China with abundant tourism resources, as a case study. First, we extracted tourist trips from taxi trajectories and used kernel density estimation to analyze the spatial aggregation characteristics of tourist trip origins. Second, we investigated the spatial dependence of tourist trips using local spatial autocorrelation analysis (Getis-Ord Gi*). Third, we explored the correlations between the tourist trip origins and urban geographic contextual factors (e.g., catering services and transportation facilities) using a geographically weighted regression model. The results show the following: (1) the trends between the coverage of tourist travel networks and the volume of tourist trips are similar; (2) the spatial interaction intensity of urban tourism has grouping and hierarchical characteristics; and (3) the spatial distribution of tourist trips by taxi is uneven and influenced by the distribution of urban morphology, tourism resources, and the preferences of taxi pick-up passengers. Our proposed framework and revealed spatial and temporal patterns have implications for urban tourism traffic planning, tourism product development, and tourist flow control in tourist attractions