Jing He

SNA cohort

If I had unlimited resources, time, and access to information, I could use SNA to address that what is the most important reasons for people going to travel. It is called tourist flow. Tourist flow is the basis of the tourism industry, is one of the core problems in tourism geography research. We can use SNA to analysis on tourism flow.

Data analysis model	Social network	Tourism flow network
density of population， distance, reachability.	General characteristics for the Internet description of the social network.	Show the regional structure degree of  harmonious and prefect.
Cohesive Subgroups Analysis	Describe the cohesion of the network and find out the most cohesion group.	The destination tourist flow is more close to reveal area.
Role analysis	Analysis whether there is the approximate location of the actors in a network.	Contribute to the development of tourism products and the development of other destination competition relations
Core – edge Analysis	Edge and core whether there is correlation and correlation dimension or not.	To optimize the structure of regional tourism

Background:

Many developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America do not show any international arrivals because their international tourism flows do not belong to the 168 largest flows we selected. This map also reinforces the perception that Europe is the most important (international) tourism destination. (source:http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/4/1/42/htm)

SNA and Toursim

For most organizations, people can not collect all the information for tourists because tourists might from all over the world and complicated age range. But we can estimate the rules of tourist flow is in favor of product development and route organization in making of regional tourism planning by SNA. In other words, it is significant to develop the inbound tourist market of places of interest by studying the inbound tourism of places of interest from the angle of tourist flow, which is regarded as a new field of study.

Because tourism is a kind of service so that it has it own particularity which means it is vey hard to judge the performances and service quality. But we can easy to work out density of population distance and reachability from computer record and travel agency.

Measure	Definition	Possible Interpretation
Degree	Node with the most connection with other places.	The famous or popular places.
Betweenness	Node on the most paths among other agents.	Connected places, travel agency, visit center.
Closeness	Node having average number of paths to reach every other places of interest.	Routers, communicators, planers.
Eigenvector	Node well connected to other well-connected places.	Tour guides, travel  agencies,  representatives.

As far as I am concerned, the most important measure is Eigenvector for some reasons. Most people will know the information from tour guides and travel agencies. Therefore, if they do a good job about the advertisement, I believe most people will choose to go that places first instead of other please. 

 SNA in tourism research

Traditional tourism research would separate every single object in order to focus on traditional mathematical statistics. But using SNA model would not ignore the connections among the sources. For example, Yeong- Hyeon hwang used SNA to identify the role of cities in different areas of the United States tourist opinions. There are some helpful paths by using SNA. First, it can combine the space tourism flow and destination. Secondly, it can benefit for tourism destination management. Thirdly, it can benefit for tourism corporations’ management. Last but not least, it can investigate the tourists’ attitude formation and behavioral decision research.