Exploring tourist activities across cultures based on venue check-in data

Insights into tourist activities play an important role in strategic planning and decision making of destination management organisations (DMOs) to utilise the great economic benefits of the tourism industry. Yet, complete and comprehensive understanding about tourist activities has not been obtained. This paper introduces venue check-in data as an effective means to capture and explore tourist activities at a comprehensive manner. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through a case study of inbound tourists to France using a large-scale data set. The analyses reveal activity preferences and temporal behaviour of tourists from 14 source countries on various activity categories, which are useful for DMOs in tourism management applications. The introduced method is beneficial to tourism researchers in capturing and gaining comprehensive insights into tourist activities.