Purpose

Knowing the behavior of tourists visiting cultural destinations enables better management of tourist flows, a better understanding of areas with greater tourist density and an opportunity to decongest popular neighborhoods. The purpose of this study is to segment tourists according to their spatio-temporal behavior and identify the primary variables that characterize the resulting segments, which will help urban destinations prevent problems arising from the saturation of tourists in certain areas.

Design/methodology/approach

To do this, this paper analyzes the behavior of tourists visiting the southeastern Spanish city of Granada, one of the most highly visited cultural tourism destinations. The data analysis used the methodology of sequence alignment which is used to identify segments as a function of their contained elements and the order in which these appear.

Findings

The results demonstrate the existence of three segments with different behavioral patterns: the “explorer tourists” segment, the “non-traditional cultural tourists” segments and the “typical cultural tourists” segment. These segments show differences in the concentration of their visits. This study discovered that the segments that visit a greater number of destination areas are those with less cultural orientation, higher travel budgets and younger and more frequent visitors.

Originality/value

In the segmentation not only keep in mind the visited areas, but the order in which they were visited as well. In addition, one should consider the time that each tourist remains in each relevant zone of the destination, given that the visiting time is an important variable to assess the congestion of an area.

中文翻译：

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确定旅游概况以减少过度旅游：以文化目的地为例

目的

了解游客参观文化目的地的行为可以更好地管理游客流量，更好地了解游客密度更大的地区，并有机会疏散热门社区。本研究的目的是根据游客的时空行为对游客进行细分，并确定表征结果细分的主要变量，这将有助于城市目的地防止某些地区游客饱和引起的问题。

设计/方法/方法

为此，本文分析了访问西班牙东南部城市格拉纳达的游客行为，格拉纳达是访问量最大的文化旅游目的地之一。数据分析使用序列比对方法，该方法用于根据片段包含的元素和这些元素出现的顺序来识别片段。

发现

结果表明存在三个具有不同行为模式的细分市场：“探索型游客”细分市场、“非传统文化游客”细分市场和“典型文化游客”细分市场。这些细分市场显示出他们访问的集中度存在差异。该研究发现，访问更多目的地地区的细分市场是那些文化取向较少、旅行预算较高以及更年轻和更频繁的游客。

原创性/价值

在分割中，不仅要记住访问过的区域，还要记住它们被访问的顺序。此外，考虑到访问时间是评估一个地区拥堵情况的重要变量，应考虑每位游客在目的地每个相关区域停留的时间。