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Abstract

According to the initiators of the’ spatial Metro project’ the first impression when visiting a city centre is the most important one (Hoeven, Smit & Spek, 2008). Unfortunately, mostly cities are chaotic and confusing places. The Spatial Metro project addresses the topic of improving city centres for pedestrians, especially for shoppers and tourists. The question HOW and with what MEANS can only be answered if the cities have insight in the ISSUES, the VARIABLES or optional INTERVENTIONS and influence of specific SOLUTIONS. Questionnaires or street-interviews can provide information about the expectations and experience of visitors. But, more important is the information on spatial behaviour of visitors (Shoval & Isaacson, 2007), indicating destinations, routes and duration and thus also notvisited locations (Schaick & Spek, 2008). TU Delft developed a tool to collect spatio-temporal data and applied this tool in three cities: Norwich, Rouen and Koblenz (Hoeven, Smit & Spek, 2008). This chapter will focus on a method for tracking tourists in city centres.

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van der Spek, S. (2010). Tracking Tourists in Historic City Centres. In: Gretzel, U., Law, R., Fuchs, M. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2010. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-211-99407-8_16

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