Tourist mobility in digital age: A multi-dimensional analysis of cyber human activity and physical factors

Tourist mobility, as a distinct form of human mobility, has traditionally been explained by physical-space factors. However, the increasing prominence of cyber space has introduced new dynamics into tourism decision-making, as online interactions and information diffusion increasingly change destination awareness and travel intentions. Despite this shift, existing empirical studies have examined cyber contribution at micro or case-based scales, or treated them as supplementary factors, leaving their relative importance compared with traditional physical factors at large spatial scales insufficiently understood. This study develops a multi-dimensional analytical framework that integrates cyber human activity with conventional physical factors, including geographic, economic, climatic, and temporal variables, to explain intercity tourist mobility. Using monthly tourist flow data from over 300 cities across China to Nanjing, combined with large-scale Weibo social media and physical factors, a Random Forest model with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) is employed to quantify the relative importance and interaction effects. The results indicate that tourist flows are closely related to cyber human activity. Specifically, the intensity of cyber activity exhibits a nonlinear saturation relation, whereby increased online engagement is associated with higher tourist volumes up to a threshold, beyond which marginal effects stabilize. Geographic proximity remains a dominant factor with clear distance-decay effect, while the explanatory power of climatic and temporal factors is comparatively weaker when assessed alongside other variables. These insights reveal a dual-space mechanism for tourist mobility in which cyber and physical spaces jointly influence modern tourism behavior and offer an evidence-based perspective for optimizing digital tourism marketing.