Cruise tourism plays an important role as an economic factor for the major northern German cities. Nevertheless, cruise tourism is often criticized in terms of environmental sustainability, but also in terms of social sustainability. For example, it is unclear which routes cruise tourists take in the destination after their arrival and which attractions they visit in the destination. Previous studies to determine the spatiotemporal behavior of cruise tourists use GPS tracking in combination with guest surveys. No studies in Germany are known to date. Passive mobile tracking based on anonymized geolocation events from smartphone applications offered by geolocation brokers on the market allow a newer approach with big data. This data is now being analyzed for the first time for cruise tourism in the city of Hamburg. The project partners are the Harz University of Applied Sciences (Prof. Dr. Sven Groß) and the company MB-Micromarketing, with the following research questions at the forefront: Which routes do arriving cruise passengers take in Hamburg? Which attraction points are visited? How are these combined? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the data source used? How valid is the data used, e.g. in comparison to reference data? What are the findings with regard to the representativeness of the data?
West Coast University of Applied Sciences
German Institute for Tourism Research
Fritz-Thiedemann-Ring 20
25746 Heide
