Blog

Filter by:

Limit to posts where the title matches:
Limit to posts where the date of the blog post:
Limit to posts tagged with one or more of:
Limit to posts where the audience is one or more of:
Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Google Earth 5.0 - make your own tour?

Google has recently released the latest and greatest version of their free popular geographic information package. This version bring a whole host of new features, including the ability to look at historical imagery, the addition of Mars and underwater viewing. My favorite new feature is the "record a tour" option, which lets you track a session (including zooming and panning) while recording commentary.

I’m pleased to announce that a chapter describing the development of TourSim, including a scenario on shifting tourist port of entry and identification of adoption constraints, is in the final stages of preparation for publication. This chapter is part of a new book "Planning Support Systems Best Practice and New Methods" published by Springer and edited by Stan Geertman and John Stillwell.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

I want your opinion!

Just a reminder that your opinion is a big part of my research. If you have used any of the versions of TourSim on this site, please take a moment to fill out a survey. The TourSim evaluation survey is a great place to start.

Thank you for your interest and help!

Peter

I’ve made some major alterations to TourSim, both in the data that it relies on, and the types of experimentation it supports. I’m thinking that this is going to make TourSim much more usable for tourism planning, and begins to incorporate many of the ideas of complexity science (such as adaptation) into TourSim.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

A simple tourism model with Excel

While there is quite a bit of interest in several fields in agent-based models (ABMs) as an approach to studying issues such as resilience, and thresholds, their complexity and technical nature is a significant barrier to their use. I’ve had a number of discussions with McGill professor Dr. Garry Peterson about alternate modeling approaches. One technology that he uses in both classes and in his publications is a simple Excel spreadsheet.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Adaptative destination model

For quite a while now I’ve been trying to expand the types of adaptive behaviour included in TourSim. Currently the tourists display a type of adaptive behaviour, as they move to destinations that satisfy their preferences. In the Baddeck Hotel Development model, tourists would adapt to the development of a new hotel, as more tourists visited Baddeck because of this new type of accommodation.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Baddeck Hotel Development results

I’ve been putting together some sample results using the Baddeck Hotel Development scenario. I ran the model with the default range of accommodations, and then re-ran it with the “Add Hotel at Baddeck” button selected. You can experiment with this same scenario under the Tourism Scenarios tab. Below I’ve added a chart that shows the percentage change in tourist visitation per day (blue bar) and percentage change in income per day (green bar) at select destinations. This shows the difference between the base scenario and the add hotel scenario.

I’ve added a new scenario to the Tourism Scenarios section. This is the second model, and is a variation on my first model. This model, titled the “Port of Entry Destination Comparison Model”, allows you to compare the effects of varying tourist port of entry on the total visitation to Lunenburg, Baddeck, and Digby. I hope to implement a function to allow you to pick from a greater range of destinations in future versions of the model. Anyways, please check out the model.