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Purpose — The Department for Transport's 2011 GPS National Travel Survey (NTS) pilot study investigated whether personal GPS devices and automated data processing could be used in place of the 7-day paper diary. Using GPS technology could reduce the relatively high burden that the diary places upon respondents, reduce costs and improve data quality.

Design/methodology/approach — Data was collected from c.900 respondents. Practical changes were made to the existing methodology where necessary, including the collection of information to support data processing. Processing was undertaken using the University of Eindhoven's Trace Annotator. Results from the GPS pilot were then compared to those from the main NTS diaries for the same period.

Findings — There were no insurmountable problems using GPS devices to collect data; however, the processed GPS data did not resemble the diary outputs, making GPS unsuitable for the NTS. The GPS data produced fewer and longer trips than the diary data. The purpose of a quarter of the GPS trips was unclear, and a disproportionate share started and ended at home.

Research limitations — Further work to manually inspect trips identified via validation as unfeasible and subsequently refine the processing algorithms would have been desirable had time permitted. GPS data processing may have been hindered by missing GPS data, particularly in the case of rail travel.

Originality/value — This research used an accelerometer-equipped GPS device to better predict the method of travel. It also combined addresses that respondents reported having visited during the travel week with GIS data to code the purpose of trips without using a post-processing prompted-recall survey.