An analysis of the behavior of inbound tourists in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area from the data of IC transit cards

Since 2007, East Japan Railway Company has been selling sets of an IC transit card called “Suica” and discounted tickets for an airport shuttle N’EX (Narita Express) to foreign tourists coming to Japan. In this paper, we use the transit data of Suica & N’EX to investigate the behavior of inbound tourists in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. From our sequence alignment analysis, the movement of inbound tourists has been identified as two patterns: (1) spending longtime in one area, and (2) being around multiple areas. In addition, a list of stations where tourists frequently mistakenly enter has been extracted. Furthermore, we compared the actual length of time between stations with the expected travel time when using the shortest path and identified several routes where tourists tended to take unnecessary detours.