Extraction of Long Sightseeing Kaiyu Routes in the Kyushu Wide Region, Japan

Kyushu Island is the southernmost island among four major islands composing Japan, Hokkaido, Mainland, Shikoku, and Kyushu. It consists of seven prefectures: Fukuoka, Saga, Nagasaki, Oita, Kumamoto, Miyazaki, and Kagoshima. Its population is 11,912 thousand persons, according to the 2015 census, and its area is 42,231 square kilometers.

The Act on the Development of Comprehensive Resort Areas, commonly called the Resort Act, was promulgated on June 9, 1987. At that time, the Act encouraged the local governments to make various resort plans. As a result, 42 resort plans and their designated areas exist as of April 2011.

See Saaty [8] for the analytic hierarchy process. For the ratio scale decomposition analysis and its application, refer to Saito [2, 3].

0.5 is added to make the denominator not become zero during the calculation process.

Since we do not have any other data available, in this study, we extract and analyze the long sightseeing travel-around route throughout the broad Kyushu region from the hotel guest survey at Fukuoka City. Of course, there are data constraints. However, we believe that the analysis method and data selection used in this study are valid from the following reasons, and this analysis is also highly significant. First, according to other statistics, among the number of people entering the Kyushu region as a whole, the number of people entering Fukuoka prefecture is 34% (Source: “National tourism trends,” the Japan Tourism Association edition 1988). Therefore, it is expected that the percentage of tourists to the Kyushu region who enter Fukuoka City as the first destination of their tour will have a considerable weight. Second, since the eigenvector method uses the ratio of the observed frequency, it is not significantly affected by the sample size. As expected, the data includes a large number of observations in the surroundings of Fukuoka city, and as the observed frequency decreases in remote areas, this effect is reduced. Third, the analysis of the shop-around effect is the effect of one tour of a Fukuoka city hotel guest, and if we conduct a similar study in other areas to obtain the shop-around effect in the future, we can incorporate this additional shop-around effect by adding to the previous one. Therefore, it is possible to repeat similar studies in various places and extend to more real conditions by adding them to this analysis.

The original version of this chapter appeared in Saito and Sakamoto [9].