Spatial differential features of inbound tourists in Jiangsu, China

The spatial differential features of tourists are the fundamental of tourism spatial structure research. Though many literatures on this issue have offered some efficient approaches, spatial view has not been paid sufficient attention to in the statistical model for spatial correlation. To explore the variation and mechanism of tourist spatial difference, exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) has been employed, taking the data of inbound tourist arrivals of all the cities in Jiangsu province from 2001 to 2009. Box-Cox transform has been taken to normalizing the data before ESDA. The Global and Local spatial autocorrelation analysis has been employed to examine the spatial aggregation characteristics and measure tourist distribution differences and significance between cities. Detailed discussions are then made referring to the spatial aggregation and diffusion effect. Finally, the conclusions are obtained.