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Group Travel: Visualizing Spatio-temporal Guest Patterns in Historical Resort Hotels
| Historical GIS can be used to plot hotel guest hinterlands, revealed through place-of-residence information on the signature lines of hotel guest registers. Data from an array of seasonal hotels, including several upscale ones, reveals quite distant and often metropolitan guest hinterlands. In contrast to the contiguous cluster of proportional circles used to plot dozens of local and regional guest places for year-round small-town Main Street hotels, these resort hotels offer a quite different spatial and temporal signature. Examples are drawn from hotels in Canada, Morocco and several American states (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Pennsylvania). Most of the guests arrived in groups – couples, families, or large parties. Calendaring visit frequencies, and where these groups came from and in some cases were going to, while also illustrating and analyzing occupational, class and gender profiles, presents interesting multi-scalar visualization conundrums. The interactive exploratory and hypothesis-building capabilities of HotelVIZ are brought to bear on multi-dimensional heterogeneous data clusters, and preliminary explanations of some spatio-temporal patterns are presented.
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