Patterns of Regional Travel Behavior: An Analysis of Japanese Hotel Reservation Data

TL;DR

This paper analyzes Japanese hotel reservation data to uncover regional travel patterns, using statistical models like finite mixture Poisson distributions and EM-algorithm to understand demand-supply dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to infer the probability of room availability and characterizes demand-supply relationships based on reservation data.

Findings

Identified migration trends across four Japanese regions.

Developed a probabilistic model for room availability.

Linked room prices with availability probabilities.

Abstract

This study considers the availability of room opportunities collected from a Japanese hotel booking site. We empirically analyze the daily number of room opportunities for four areas. To determine the migration trends of travelers, we discuss a finite mixture of Poisson distributions and the EM-algorithm as its parameter estimation method. We further propose a method to infer the probability of opportunities existing for each observation. We characterize demand-supply situations by means of relationship between the averaged room prices and the probability of opportunity existing.