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through the recallable memory of a tourist stopping and taking photos and this may
be one reason why this activity has the most consistent arrival times amongst the
eight activities. Activities of having food is often a time related event, which might
explain why less arrival times are missed for these stops. Socialising is an activity
related to people, the time starts and ends are easy to recall, hence the durations
about social activity are less missed. In contrast, events about accommodation and
recreation have less completeness and consistency, as they are not very time-
restricted. The duration of accommodation is normally simply recorded as
''overnight'', consequently, it is seldom missed out in the survey. Shopping is a
random and additional activity during itineraries; it is not time-restricted either and
probably has less impression on the tourists mind compared with other activities,
so there are relatively more missing temporal events with respect to this activity in
the travel survey data.
The patterns of gaps and errors associated with activities takes samples with
solo activity only, therefore the figure shows a lower percentage of gaps than the
percentage for the entire dataset since single activity events are easier to recall than
multiple activity events. To examine the pattern of gaps associated with visiting
characteristics on the whole dataset, the approach can be achieved by categorising
stops based on both activity and duration attributes, stops are grouped into four
main types: stopover, main attraction, overnight stop and enter/exit stop.
The missing events percentages by types of stops in Fig.
8
c demonstrate an
identical result to the previous discussion about spatial pattern of incompleteness
and the gaps distribution by activities. Those enter or exit stops have more pos-
sibility of missing arrival times, the duration events are not included here since the
exit stops have no durations. Overnight stops have lower percentage of missing
events than those portal stops. Finally, main attractions have better completeness
of temporal events followed by stopovers.
3.2.4 Patterns of Gaps and Errors by Tourists' Profiles
Recall ability varies from one person to another, depending on people's ages,
gender and other profiles. The reported data quality therefore shows patterns
among different types of tourists' profiles.
Gender is an interesting reference for assessing the data quality of spatiotem-
poral events recorded by tourists as Fig.
9
a shows. Females are commonly
regarded as having a lower level of spatial awareness and lower capability of
memorising times compared with males (Ecuyer-Dab and Robert
2004
). However,
females probably have more patience to respond to the survey. Although it does
not directly show whether male or female tourists did better a job in recording the
temporal events in WCTFS, the conclusion is manifest that female respondents
performed better in the data completeness but slightly behind male respondents in
relation to the accuracy of the temporal events.
Another data quality pattern can be found from the travel group characteristics.
Figure
9
b shows that the fewer adults in the itinerary group, the lower the
