Beyond Sights: Large Scale Study of Tourists´ Behavior Using Foursquare Data

In this paper, we show how we can use Foursquare check-ins to understand the behavior of tourists that would be hard using traditional methods, such as surveys. For that, we analyze the behavior of tourists and residents in four popular cities around the world in four continents: London, New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo. We perform a spatio-temporal study of properties of the behavior of these two classes of users (tourists and residents). We have identified, for instance, that some locations have features that are more correlated with the tourists´ behavior, and also that even in places frequented by tourists and residents there are clear distinction in the patterns of behavior of these groups of users. Our study also enables to identify which and when sights are popular. Our results could be useful in several cases, for example, to help in the development of new place recommendation systems for tourists, or to help city planners to better support tourists in their cities.