A time-geographic approach to studying tourist-resident interactions in a travel destination

Understanding how tourists and residents interact through everyday travel and activity participation is critical for addressing social tensions in travel destinations. Existing assessments of tourism pressure largely rely on aggregate indicators, such as tourist-to-resident ratios, which overlook how these two groups interact across space, time, and activity venues in their daily behavior and provide limited details for designing nuanced policy interventions. This study addresses this gap by proposing an activity-informed time-geographic framework that conceptualizes tourist-resident interactions as a multidimensional behavioral process unfolding across space, time, and activity participation. Building on classic time-geographic concepts of space–time paths and bundles, the framework identifies four interaction modes and characterizes them into a hierarchical set of co-location scenarios with different levels of direct contact potential. Global and local indices are developed to quantify interaction potential under different scenarios. Using geolocated debit and credit card transaction data from Jeju, Korea, the empirical results demonstrate that commonly used aggregate indicators overestimate tourism pressure by ignoring behavioral segregation between the two groups across space, time, and activity venues. Interaction hotspots are highly concentrated in dining and retail venues during lunch and dinner hours. Spatially, distinct interaction patterns emerge across various areas, like in city centers, tourists and residents engage in different activities simultaneously, whereas in resort areas, they share the same activities but at different times. This study extends time-geographic approaches by incorporating the activity dimension into social interaction analysis. It provides insights into the details of tourist-resident frictions, supporting more targeted and adaptive destination management strategies.