Spatial Clustering Patterns of Domestic and International Tourists: Integrating Machine Learning Classification with Spatial Statistics for Bilingual Review Analysis

Abstract

Tourism destinations increasingly serve both domestic and international visitors whose geographic behaviors may differ substantially, yet most analytical frameworks treat visitor distributions as spatially homogeneous. Few studies compare how domestic and international tourists cluster spatially within the same destination. Those differences matter enormously for destinations where visitor segments follow distinct geographic patterns. We analyzed 1547 bilingual TripAdvisor reviews from Chanthaburi Province, Thailand (2014–2023), combining Random Forest classification (83.26% accuracy for Thai, 96.45% for English) with Incremental Spatial Autocorrelation (ISA), Global Moran’s I, and Getis-Ord Gi* hotspot analysis. International visitors clustered more intensely overall (I = 0.253 vs. 0.213), but domestic visitors spread across all six tourism areas including agrotourism, while international visitors were concentrated in heritage, coastal recreation, and nature-temple zones with agrotourism absent. Both segments clustered strongly at cultural heritage sites and at beach destinations, contradicting the common assumption that coastal areas primarily serve international visitors, while agrotourism clustered exclusively among domestic visitors despite active policy promotion. These patterns reflect differential information access rather than attraction quality. The zone-level framework is transferable to secondary heritage destinations across Southeast Asia, where platform-based monitoring offers a practical alternative to large-scale visitor surveys.