Evaluating the Progress of Tourism in a Less-Developed Area of China: A Tourism Development Index Approach Based on Night-Time Light and POI Data

Understanding the status and progress of tourism is a critical step for formulating sustainable tourism strategies. A traditional statistical data-based evaluation of tourism development is costly and time-consuming. Recently, remote sensing data and geospatial big data allow the rapid and convenient observation of socioeconomic development and provide opportunities for the cheap and updated analysis of tourism development. This study develops a tourism development index to quickly catch the development status of tourism in one city with open-access night-time lighting (NTL) data and point-of-interest (POI) data. The index is applied to evaluate the tourism development in Yunnan Province, a less-developed region in China, and compared with the traditional statistical data-based evaluation. The results show the following: (1) The index constructed with open-access data offers a cheap and fast way to evaluate the status of tourism development and could obtain a result similar to the traditional statistical data-based method. (2) Tourism development in Yunnan Province is uneven, with two tourism centers significantly surpassing the others: Kunming and Lijiang–Dali. (3) An increasing polarization has characterized the progress of tourism among cities in Yunnan Province over the years. This study is an attempt to rapidly evaluate tourism development using only open-access data, which could play a positive role in saving public management costs in less-developed areas.