Comparing global tourism flows measured by official census and social sensing

A better understanding of the behavior of tourists is strategic for improving services in the competitive and important economic segment of global tourism. Critical studies in the literature often explore the issue using traditional data, such as questionnaires or interviews. Traditional approaches provide precious information; however, they impose challenges to obtaining large-scale data, making it hard to study worldwide patterns. Location-based social networks (LBSNs) can potentially mitigate such issues due to the relatively low cost of acquiring large amounts of behavioral data. Nevertheless, before using such data for studying tourists’ behavior, it is necessary to verify whether the information adequately reveals the behavior measured with traditional data — considered the ground truth. Thus, the present work investigates in which countries the global tourism network measured with an LBSN agreeably reflects the behavior estimated by the World Tourism Organization using traditional methods. Although we could find exceptions, the results suggest that, for most countries, LBSN data can satisfactorily represent the behavior studied. We have an indication that, in countries with high correlations between results obtained from both datasets, LBSN data can be used in research regarding the mobility of the tourists in the studied context.