Open GPS data on cruise visitors in Palermo

The question

The article releases the raw GPS data collected on cruise passengers in Palermo in 2014 and proposes a procedure for cleaning them of errors and gaps, in order to support comparison between methods for analysing tourist mobility.

The method

Data paper: GPS tracks recorded about every 10 seconds with Globalsat DG-200 loggers handed to independent cruise passengers (about 1 in 20 of those disembarking, pseudo-systematic sampling) from 15 to 30 April 2014, plus initial and final questionnaires; 162 trajectories published. Pre-processing in Python with dynamic moving medians and IQR thresholds to detect and impute spatial and temporal outliers.

What the study finds

162 routesof independent cruise passengers in the open datasetThe released dataset includes 162 individual routes of cruise passengers who visited Palermo independently.

≈ 3 h 58 minaverage length of the tracked visitThe tracked visit lasted on average about 3 hours 58 minutes, ranging from 36 minutes to 9 hours 3 minutes.

≈ 2 kmaverage maximum distance from the starting pointOn average, visitors went no farther than about 2 km from the starting point; the highest recorded value was 5.5 km.

13.9 kmaverage total distance covered during the visitTotal distance covered during the visit averaged 13.9 km, with a maximum above 41 km.

Participants were recruited by approaching roughly one in every twenty disembarking passengers on every cruise call day in the second half of April 2014.
On average 15% of points per track were spatial outliers and 15% temporal outliers, showing that raw GPS data need systematic cleaning.

From the study's figures

An example of a cruise passenger's GPS track in Palermo, after data cleaning.
Figure from Ferrante, M.; Perri, A.; De Cantis, S. et al. (2025), CC BY 4.0 licence.

Why it matters for ports and cities

It provides open data on the actual movements of cruise passengers in a Mediterranean port city, so authorities and researchers can compare methods and indicators on a common basis. The descriptive statistics point to stays of a few hours, mostly within a few kilometres of the starting point.

Limitations

Data collected only in April 2014 and in a single city, limited to independent passengers and to a single GPS model; the cleaning does not use map matching and the mode of transport was not recorded.

Full reference and source

Ferrante, M., Perri, A., De Cantis, S., Birenboim, A., Shoval, N. (2025). Raw and pre-processed cruise passengers’ GPS tracking datasets. Data in Brief 63 (2025) 112078 (Elsevier).

Summary written by the ODYBOAT Observatory in our own words. Tables and figures belong to the authors.