Exploring tourism networks in the Guangxi mountainous area using mobility data from user generated content

Liu, Yanhua, Cheng, Jianquan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9778-9009 and Lyu, Yulan (2022) Exploring tourism networks in the Guangxi mountainous area using mobility data from user generated content. Journal of Mountain Science, 19. pp. 322-337. ISSN 1993-0321

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Abstract

Tourism-led economic growth and tourism-driven urbanization have attracted increasing attention by provinces and regions in China with abundant tourism resources. Due to low data availability, the current tourism literature lacks empirical evidence of the tourism network in less-developed mountainous regions where the development of transport infrastructure is more variable. This paper aims to provide such evidence using Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in China as a case study. Using User Generated Content (UGC) data, this study constructs a tourism network in Guangxi. By integrating social network analysis with spatial interaction modelling, we compared the impact of two different transport infrastructures, highway and high-speed railway, on tourist flows, particularly in less-developed mountainous regions. It was found that the product of node centrality and flow could best describe the significant pushing and pulling forces on the flow of tourists. The tourism by high-speed railway was sensitive to the position of trip destination on the whole tourism network but self-drive tourism was more sensitive to travelling time. The increase of high-speed railway density is crucial to promote local tourism-led economic development, however, large-scale karst landforms in the study area present a significant obstacle to the construction of high-speed railways.