Spatial distribution of the inlinks to the Beijing tourist attractions´ websites

This paper presents the results of an investigation into spatial distribution of hyperlinks to the Beijing tourist attractions´ official Websites. The purpose of this study is to assess whether the hyperlink in the Web could be used to do tourism research. Through this study, the simple inlink count to a tourist attraction´s official Website was found to highly correlate with the number of the tourist attraction´s visitors. This suggests that the inlink count could indicate the attractiveness of a tourist attraction. Further study gives some evidence that spatial distribution of all the inlinks to the Beijing tourist attractions´ official Websites could reflect the distribution, by country, of the attractiveness of Beijing as a tourist destination.