"The digital remeasurement of tourist action areas"

Completed doctorate (2021) in cooperation with the Institute of Geography at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn (Prof. Dr. Claus-Christian Wiegandt)

Knowing how tourists move to and within a destination has become essential for sustainable destination development and has become even more important as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated need to know about (tourist) visitor hotspots. In recent years, there has been a shift towards the digital in the measurement of tourism movement patterns, which is reflected in the increased use of digital data sources in research and practice. Big data plays a special role in this development. The digital data traces generated as part of various processes, such as passive mobile phone data, Twitter posts, credit card transactions, etc., are provided with geographical coordinates and are increasingly being used to analyze the spatiotemporal behavior of individuals. Research on these data sources – especially in German-speaking tourism geography – is still in its infancy. At the same time, a large number of small data studies are being developed in which people are equipped with sensors as part of interdisciplinary research in order to learn more about human-environment relationships. These approaches, for example through the use of body measurements such as heart rate and skin conductivity, are being adapted for tourism geography research and used to identify emotions during the tourist experience in the destination. Here, too, there is still a wide range of research needs with regard to the use of methods and the analysis methodology. This cumulative dissertation starts at this point by discussing the digital remeasurement of tourist action spaces. The focus of the work is on the presentation, testing and discussion of digital data sources for determining the spatio-temporal behavior of tourists. This is done on the basis of three research articles published in national and international journals (double-blind review). New data sources (passive mobile phone data) are examined with regard to their usability for measuring tourist action spaces (Article 1), an already established research method (active GPS tracking in combination with surveys) is further developed in terms of content and analysis (Article 2) and a new approach is presented that uses active GPS tracking and biosensing to help understand the emotional experience of tourists in the destination (Article 3). In this framework, the three articles are contextualized and discussed against this background. Classical concepts of action space research are transferred to tourism geography and thus a conceptual framework for the specifics of tourism action spaces is developed. The new data sources emerging in the context of a multi-layered digital turn to measure tourism action spaces are described and classified according to their spatial coverage. The proposed classification of digital data sources on the macro, meso and micro levels serves as a scheme for categorizing the three published research papers. As a result, the cumulative dissertation makes a contribution to the application of new and the further development of existing methods of digital mapping of tourist action spaces and thus shows the possibilities, but also the limits of a new digital mapping of tourist action spaces.