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Due to the rapid growth of the tourism industry, associated effects like overcrowding, overtourism, and increasing greenhouse gas emissions lead to unsustainable development. A prerequisite for avoiding those adverse effects is the prediction of occupancy. The present study elaborates on the applicability and performance of various prediction models by taking a case study of beach occupancy data in Scharbeutz, Germany. The case study compares different machine learning models once as supervised machine learning models and once as time series models with a persistence model. XGBoost and Random Forest as time series demonstrate the most accurate prediction, followed by the supervised XGBoost model. However, the short prediction span of time series models is a disadvantage for longer-term visitor management to avoid the explained unsustainable effects through steering measures, so depending on the use case, the XGBoost model is to be favoured.
Tourism is an important economic driver for numerous regions, at- tracting more than one billion visitors annually. While economically significant, excessive numbers of visitors lead to local overcrowding, which negatively im- pacts visitors’ experience and safety, and causes environmental harm. This paper proposes a practical approach to empowering destination management organiza- tions (DMOs) to manage tourist flows. We advocate for a rule-based approach that models visitor occupancy based on easily understandable influence factors like weather and date. As a central component, an ontology-guided knowledge graph ensures compatibility with diverse touristic data models and allows seam- less integration into existing infrastructures. By digitizing DMOs’ experiential knowledge, we facilitate the implementation of lean and cost-effective visitor guidance. We demonstrate our approach by implementing two applications for two different use cases. The results of our qualitative evaluation reveal the com- pelling potential for rule-based occupancy modeling approaches serving as a baseline for future visitor management systems.
Sustainability is a critical challenge in modern tourism, exacerbated by climate change and globalization. Thanks to digitization, data-driven approaches constitute a key technology for addressing related issues, such as overtourism. However, the overarching complexity of the touristic data landscape, amplified by the interplay of diverse digital platform ecosystems, poses considerable challenges to both data owners and consumers. To mitigate such issues, knowledge graphs (KGs) have received significant attention. KGs focus on data quality by employing unified data models and continuous data refinements, making them well-suited for data-driven applications. Although promising, many challenges must be addressed to make KGs useful in practice. This paper overviews the state of the art of the field and identifies avenues for future research, explicitly focusing on touristic value and sustainability. Following our results, future research should focus on different areas, notably real-time knowledge graph population, distributed and parallelized processes, and ontologies for dynamic data types.