Data Mining of Tourists’ Spatio-temporal Movement Patterns ---A Case Study on Phillip Island

In these days, understanding tourists’ spatio-temporal movement behaviour is becoming more and more important factor for success of tourist marketing. This paper uses a general purpose data mining tool to identify tourist spatiotemporal movement patterns and across patterns between tourist profiles and their spatio-temporal movement patterns. Major temporal movement sequences and spatial movement sequences are discovered and compared. For example, if tourists only visited one attraction in the evening for their day-trip it is Penguin parade. Clustering method is used to identify tourists’ market segment for each attraction. There are various key attributes to group tourists for different attractions. Type of visitors (international or domestic tourists) is the most important attribute to cluster the tourists on the Phillip Island. Differences of tourists for each attraction and movement pattern are also compared using classification algorithms. However these differences are not significant.