Macao Travels-Proposal

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Research Paper

Problem Statement

Macao’s tourism industry has always been one of the most important industries driving economic progress, with visitor arrivals in Macao reporting around 32 million visitors in 2017. Another key aspect of tourism in Macao is its gaming industry. The most densely populated region in the world heavily relies on the popularity of being a gambling destination. 40% of Macao’s GDP comes from the gaming industry and more than 70% of tax revenues are collected from casinos. Despite the rapid growth, the Macao SAR Government has the vision to build it into a World Centre of Tourism and Leisure in the next 15 years. Hence, one of the key questions while analyzing Macao’s tourism statistics would be how the Government of Macao could uncover and utilise trends and patterns to further boost their economy by optimising marketing campaigns and imports.

Motivation

The tourism industry has always been one of the most important industries driving economic progress in Macao. Ever since the establishment of the Macao Special Administrative Region (Macao SAR), special emphasis has been placed on the development of the city’s tourism industry, which has been a catalyst for continued growth over the last decade.

Our main motivation in this is to address the lack of a convenient and comprehensive platform to study the correlation and trends amidst Macao’s most important industry to their financial growth. The current visualisation tool employed by Macao’s Government is inadequate and difficult to visualise trends and uncover patterns for the tourism industry. The Macao Government Tourism only provides market report and basic info-graphics on tourist arrivals and hotel statistics. Furthermore, the Macao’s government does not have a proper visualisation tool for its gaming industry, which is a huge component of the tourism industry in Macao. This project provides an interactive visualization to better analyze Macao’s tourism industry, consisting of lodging, gaming and tourism spending. Through our visualisation, we aim to identify the relation between the tourism industry, and its two biggest components: hotel and gaming industry, as well as to uncover trends and patterns that the Government of Macao can utilise to further boost their economy by optimising marketing campaigns. We aim to answer questions such as how much resources should be allocated to Macao’s tourism industry, or where do most of Macao’s main contributors to its tourism industry come from?

Objectives

This project aims to provide insights into the following:

1. Gain insights on the monthly/yearly visitors arrivals to Macao and their average length of stay over the past 10 years
2. Identify tourists preference for accommodation
3. Breakdown of tourists’ expenditure to find out which country is spending the most in Macao and which area they are spending the most on (e.g. Shopping, F&B)
4. Gain insights on Macao’s gaming industry and the popular games at the Casinos

Background survey of related works

Visualizations	Insights and Explanation
Source: https://mbienz.shinyapps.io/tourism_dashboard_prod//center>	This visualization allows users to find out how many international tourists are coming into Macao every year. Furthermore, the plotting of both a 12-month rolling average and observation on the same graph enables us to have a quick and clear overview. However, one drawback of the visualisation is that it does not allow us to plot different countries on the same graph. Hence, this visualization is only limited to viewing the overall incoming tourist into Macao and users are unable to visualize the incoming number of tourists from each country individually. To overcome this drawback, my team will have a similar line chart that allow users to view the incoming tourist from each country.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/tourism	The used of an area chart is an effective way of displaying the total international tourist arrivals by region. The area allows users to see the tourist arrivals breakdown for each region – each colour on the chart represents a specific region. This allows uses to get a rough gauge of the number of tourists coming from different region.
Source: https://dataplus.macaotourism.gov.mo/	This visualisation is a combo chart that comprises of two charts in one - a time-series line chart, and a bar chart, which compares the international visitor arrival with the year on year change of each country. However, this visualisation may seem confusing, and our team feels that it is necessary to show the number of international visitors arriving from each region (e.g. Asia, Europe) . Additionally, it would be good to subsequently break this down to enable zooming into a certain country's monthly changes (e.g. France, Spain, Germany).

Design Inspirations

Visualizations	Explaination
Treemap Source: https://www.dataplusscience.com/UsingTreemaps.html	Treemap diagrams can be used to visualise hierarchical and part-to-whole relationships very effectively. We can use it to visualize the number of tourists coming from different regions and countries. total spending by different visitors into Macao. One advantage of using a treemap is that we can easily derive the top 3 visiting counties to Macao. However, it does not provide us with time series analysis, and it is hard to compare the arrival of tourists across the different years. Furthermore, the hierarchy of the treemap has only 2 levels. As such, the level of details and interaction maybe limited.
Radar Chart Source: https://www.slideteam.net/spider-chart-allocated-budget-and-actual-spending.html	Radar chart is used to compare multiple quantitative variables and it is useful to identify variables with similar values and outliers amongst each variable. For our project, we can make use of the radar chart to display the breakdown of tourist spending into different categories (e.g. shopping, F&B etc). The ability to overlay the spending of different countries allows us to easily compare and identify countries with the highest spending in Macao. However, having too many overlays on a chart may cause the chart to be complicated and tedious to visualize. As such, our team may consider splitting the countries based on their region.
Map Source: https://ourworldindata.org/tourism	By using a map, we can better represent and display geographical locations data. The world map also allows us to visualize where tourists are coming from and the distance to get to Macao. Furthermore, it uses colours and legend to differentiate between the allocated budget and actual spending. We can use a similar approach where each colour represents the spending of each country.
Heat Map Source: https://www.kdnuggets.com/2016/03/4-lessons-brilliant-data-visualization.html	Heat map are graphical representations of data that utilize colour-coded systems to allow users to better visualize the volume of events and it serves the purpose of directing user’s attention towards areas on the visualization that matter most. Our has decided to incorporate the use of the heat map to identify tourist preference for the different accommodation type (e.g. 5-star, 4-star etc) as it allows us to instantly understand tourists’ behaviours and patterns.

Proposed Storyboard

Visualizations	Explaination
Storyboard 1 - Economic Contribution	The purpose is to show the comparison between Macao’s GDP and tourists spending/expenditure Provide an overview of the total visits, spending and hotel occupancy in Macao. There is a slider at the bottom of the visualization for users to select the period they want to analyse Charts used: Combo chart, Area chart
Storyboard 2 - Tourist Spending	Aims to show the breakdown of tourist spending by countries and category (e.g. entertainment, F&B) When users hover over a specific point on the map, they will be able to view the spending of that country. Filters are present on the visualization to allow users to select a region or year that they wish to analyse. Based on the user selection, the visualization will display the results accordingly. Charts used: Radar chart, Map, Bar chart, Stacked bar char, Line chart
Storyboard 3 - Tourist Arrivals	The point of this visualization is to show the trend of visitor arrivals into Macao on a yearly basis. Users can gather insights such as the arrivals trends of each country and the top 10 countries visiting Macao every year. Charts used: Packed bar chart, Line chart, Treemap, Bar chart
Storyboard 4 - Purpose of Visit	Aims to provide the purpose of arrival through trend line charts and stacked bar chart Users can use the slider to select the period they want to analyse Charts used: Stacked bar chart, Line chart
Storyboard 5 - Accommodation	Aim to show the yearly number of hotel guest for each country and the percentage of hotel room types available in Macao. A combo chart was used to allow users to visualize the total number of hotel guests and the occupancy rate on a yearly basis. More in depth analysis can be made with the line chart that shows the comparison between the occupancy rate and the number of hotels against tourist arrivals. Users will be able to determine if the increase or decrease in tourist arrivals affects the occupancy rate and the number of hotels in Macao. Charts used: Heat map, Pie chart, Bar chart, Combo chart, Line chart
Storyboard 6 - Gaming	Purpose of this visualization is to show Macao’s gaming revenue and the growth of its games. Furthermore, users can gather insights such as the top 10 games, determine whether the increase in tourist arrivals will affect the revenue of the gaming industry and the countries that contributes the most to the gaming industry in Macao. Charts used: Combo chart, Line chart and Bar chart

Datasets

We have obtained the following datasets for this research:

Dataset/Source	Data Attributes	Purpose
Gaming Statistics (CEIC) (2009 - 2018)	Number of Casinos and Gaming Table Gross Revenues Gross Receipts Betting Amounts	This dataset will allow us to see the popular games in the casinos. This can be joined with other datasets to draw a relation with the tourists that are driving the popular games.
Hotel Statistics(CEIC) (2009 - 2018)	Number of Hotels, Hotel Rooms and Hotel Beds Room Occupancy Rate Hotel Guests Average Hotel Room Rate Average Length of Stay	This dataset will allow us to determine the various statistics of hotel occupancy, which can be used to analyse visitors preference for hotels based on conditions such as price and star ratings.
Visitor Arrivals (CEIC) (2009 - 2018)	Overnight Arrivals Same Day Arrivals By Tour Package Mode of Transport	This dataset will let us see the arrivals of tourists and whether it is overnight or same day arrivals.
Resident Departures (CEIC) (2009 - 2018)	Mode of Transport Destinations	This dataset will be used to determine how residents depart, and to which country.
Visitor per Capita Spending (CEIC) (2009 - 2018)	Countries Type of Expenses Tourist Price Index	This dataset will allow us to determine what do tourists from each country spend in Macao.
Visiting Purposes (Data plus) (2009 - 2018)	Purpose of visit	This dataset will be used to understand the purpose of visit by the tourists into Macao.

Technical Challenges

Key Technical Challenges	Solution
Unfamiliarity with visualisation tools such as R, RShiny and Tableau	To address this challenge, the team will focus on learning more about the different visualisation tools on the course from Datacamp as well as to practise with the tools in our free time. We will also seek help from our fellow peers and make use of Google for any queries.
Analysis and transformation of data for visualisation	The current datasets has to be cleaned as the data is messy and the format is not proper. Since our project has 26 datasets to be analysed, we will face key issues in preparing the data for visualisation. Our team plans to split up the work into different segments and work on it individually, before coming together to check the datasets together, and promptly proceed to merge them as required.

Timeline

A list of milestones breaking the project into smaller chunks and a description of what each person in the group will work on.
Week 8: Proposal submission
Week 9: Start on Data Cleaning and Data Preparation
Week 10: Visualisation on R (Everyone)
Week 11: Visualisation on R (Everyone)
Week 12: Creation of application using R-Shiny
Week 13: Completion of posters and research paper
Week 14: Final Touchups and Submission