³There are many relevant studies, which have utilized such techniques for tourism related research. For example, Williams, Shaw (1995) applied ESDA in order to illustrate the polarization of tourism, measured by the distribution of tourists and tourism-related employment in the United Kingdom between 1980 and 1990. Feng, Morrison (2002), Lau, McKercher (2006) and Chancellor, Cole (2008) used GIS techniques to represent tourists’ movement patterns in Indiana, Hong Kong and North Carolina, respectively. More recently, Kang et al. (2014) have demonstrated the application of GIS-based ESDA in the assessment of the changing distribution of domestic tourism in South Korea between 1989 and 2011. Li et al. (2014) employed GIS tools and statistical models to investigate the spatial associations of urban tourism phenomena by examining the spatial relationships between hotel distribution and land types, attractions and other surrounding environmental factors in Hong Kong. In another register, Zhang et al. (2011) investigated the spatial dependence and the mechanisms of international and domestic tourist distributions in Chinese cities by means of ESDA based on GIS techniques.