With the further advent of the era of big data, the scale of social media data containing geolocation information is exploding, providing a new source of big data information and perspective for an in-depth study of the changing spatio-temporal and geographical characteristics of the current tourist population. This paper extracts data on popular attractions in the Tibet Autonomous Region using the HDBSCAN algorithm combined with the TF-IDF algorithm based on information on images with geotags shared by users in the Flickr image sharing site from 2005-2018. Social network analysis was used to explore the changes in the spatial and temporal characteristics of inbound tourism flows in Tibet. The results show that: (1) in terms of temporal characteristics, the number of inbound tourists shows obvious off-peak seasons, with relatively high sensitivity to the influence of economic, policy and infrastructure construction factors; (2) in terms of spatial distribution characteristics, the inbound tourism flow in Tibet shows an “axis-scattered” distribution. The core area is centred on Lhasa and extends in three directions: west, north and east along important roads.
Changes in the spatial and temporal characteristics of inbound tourism flows in Tibet based on geotagged photographs