Spatial-Temporal Evolution Patterns and Influencing Factors of Hotels in Yellow River Basin from 2012 to 2022

Governmental attention towards the high-quality development of the Yellow River basin has brought new development opportunities for the hotel industry. This study aims to reveal the spatial-temporal evolution patterns and influencing factors of hotels in the Yellow River Basin from 2012 to 2022, based on economic, social, and physical geographic data of 190,000 hotels in the Yellow River flowing. With the help of a GIS technology system, the spatial-temporal evolution patterns of all hotels, star hotels, and ordinary hotels were explored, respectively. Then, the significant influencing factors of these patterns were revealed by using geographic detector and Person correlation analysis. The following conclusions were drawn: (1) the overall scale of the hotel industry in the Yellow River Basin expanded year by year, achieving rapid growth from 2016, and fluctuating around 2020 due to the impact of the novel coronavirus epidemic; the overall spatial distribution had significant regional differences, showing the structural characteristics of “southeast more, northwest less”; (2) there was a great difference in the degree of spatial autocorrelation agglomeration among prefecture-level cities, and the degree of agglomeration of both the hotel industry as a whole and general hotels decreased year by year, showing a random distribution in 2022; star hotels were always distributed randomly. Additionally, a strong synergistic correlation was shown between the number of ordinary hotels and the number of star hotels in local space; (3) overall, the development of the hotel industry was significantly affected by seven factors: structural force, macro force, ecological force, internal power, consumption power, intermediary power, and external power. There were differences in the forces acting on different types of hotels, which gives a pattern recognition in-depth.