Do Waders, Swimmers, and Divers Exist? A GPS-Based Pilot Study of Site-Dependent Visitor Movement in Theme Parks

Abstract

Operators of large visitor attractions routinely sort their guests into intuitive behavioral types, from relaxed wanderers to single-minded maximizers, and use this informal typology to guide spatial design and to set the parameters of pedestrian and agent-based simulations. Yet the typology is seldom tested against how people actually move, and it is usually assumed to transfer unchanged between sites. We examine both assumptions with individual-level movement data: volunteers carried GPS trackers through several theme parks operated by different chains and completed a short exit survey, letting us compare what guests do with what they say. Each visit is summarized by a small set of interpretable movement features, and visitors are grouped within each site using a deliberately demanding, multi-criteria validation protocol rather than a single clustering run. The picture that emerges is nuanced. Behavioral groups recur reliably but without sharp boundaries, pointing to a continuum rather than to discrete categories; what people do diverges from how they describe themselves, so self-report is a weak proxy for observed behavior; and, most consequentially, the relationships among movement features reverse from site to site, so behavioral parameters calibrated at a given location cannot be carried elsewhere. A complementary agent-based experiment locates the origin of each group's spatial signature in where visitors choose to go and in what order, rather than in how fast or how directly they walk. The work reframes a familiar industry heuristic as a geographical, site-dependent phenomenon, contributes a reproducible and critically validated pipeline for segmenting movement data, and connects empirical tracking to simulation. Its central message is that human movement behavior must be calibrated in place, not borrowed across contexts.