Why Doesn’t the Village Next to a Tourist Hotspot Ever Take Off?
On a single trip, 83.5 percent of visitors stop at two or more destinations. So why does the village right next door always stay in the shadow of the main attraction?
Track 2.4 million social media posts, and the answer starts to take shape. This post introduces a study that used social network analysis (SNA) to map the co-visitation relationships between tourist attractions and peri-urban villages in the Dapeng Peninsula, Shenzhen, China. (Zhou et al., 2020)
Background
Looking at a single attraction hides the village’s role
The Dapeng Peninsula sits on the outskirts of Shenzhen, under mounting pressure from rapid urban expansion and development. Alongside its well-known natural and cultural attractions, the area is dotted with small villages that rarely draw visitors on their own but provide essential backstage services: lodging, meals, parking.
Most prior research analyzed the visitation patterns of individual attractions in isolation. But real trips rarely end at a single stop. Visitors move between multiple destinations in a single day, and in that process, attractions and villages form one interconnected ecosystem. The problem was that quantitative data showing these connections, which places tend to be visited together, was almost nonexistent at the village level. Villages simply don’t get mentioned often enough on social media.