Dr. JinWon Kim: Spatial hedonic Analysis of Hotel Room Price and GPS-Based mobile EXERCISE app. For National park management

February 14th, 2019

Jinwon Kim, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Tourism, Recreation and Sport Management at the University of Florida. The overall goal of his research is to identify the role of recreation, park and tourism in the creation of active, vibrant, sustainable and resilient communities. To achieve his research goal, Dr. Kim’s research has focused on three areas: (1) community development, policy and sustainability; (2) water-based tourism and recreation; (3) applications of geographic information system (GIS) and spatial technologies (GPS, RS, LiDAR) in tourism/recreation planning, development and management. As a tourism/recreation/community geographer, Dr. Kim is especially interested in applying geospatial concepts and analytical methodologies to problems that tourism and recreation managers face in their everyday decision making. His academic papers have been published in tourism, leisure, recreation, business, geography, environmental planning, community development, and public policy journals. His research has been funded by a variety of agencies and organizations including Florida Department of Transportation, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Korea National Park Service, and Korea Energy Economics Institute.

Project 1: Why Are Hotel Room Prices Different? Exploring Spatially Varying Relationships Between Room Price and Hotel Attributes

In one of his more recent projects, Dr. Jinwon Kim looked at the spatial variations among hotel room price as well as hotel attributes. This study was completed to see the different types of influences that directly affect hotel room pricing based on a hotels location and its attributes. The analysis was done on 387 hotels in the Chicago area in order to see if a location-based hotel room pricing strategy could potentially be used to maintain and monitor pricing. In the figure to right, this is an urban analysis of the 387 hotels plotted based on proximity and further separated into their regional groups. A lot of the conclusions from this study were practical knowledge, but in order to determine whether or a location-based strategy was feasible. Based on the research done by Dr. Kim, hotels rely heavily on the location to market and sell their rooms in comparison to their competing or neighboring hoteliers. This project was published in Journal of Business Research.

Project 2: GPS-Based Mobile Exercise Application: An Alternative Tool to Assess Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Visitors’ Activities in a National Park

One of the other projects Dr. Kim has been hard at work with is his cutting edge research being done with a GPS-Based Mobile Exercise Application. With the use of a GPS-based mobile exercise application dataset, this study explored the spatio-temporal behaviors of visitors’ activities in Seoraksan National Park, South Korea. A total of 1,206 anonymous mobile application users along with their 2,571 activity start points were acquired for January 2015 to December 2015. Very little research has been done in this sector and Dr. Jinwon Kim along with Dr. Brijesh Thapa (UF TRSM Faculty) have begun the trend of spatial analysis through a mobile phone app with a GPS feature. Having tangible data that can show the patterns of visitors in a given National Park, is essential to the future growth of the National Parks system. Overall this research program is a fresh and innovative idea that can be utilized around the world in all National Parks, because it is in a mobile application, there is an incentive for more physical activity as visitors of the park are now cognizant of the GPS. This project was published in the Journal of Park and Recreation Administration.

Location and Type of Seasonal Hourly Activity Hot Spots in Seoraksan National Park