  Recreational gatherings are sources of the spread of infectious diseases.
Understanding the dynamics of recreational gatherings is essential to building
effective public health policies but challenging as the interaction between
people and recreational places is complex. Recreational activities are
concentrated in a set of urban areas and establish a recreational hierarchy. In
this hierarchy, higher-level regions attract more people than lower-level
regions for recreational purposes. Here, using customers' motel booking records
which are highly associated with recreational activities in Korea, we identify
that recreational hierarchy, geographical distance, and attachment to a
location are crucial factors of recreational gatherings in Seoul, Republic of
Korea. Our analyses show that after the COVID-19 outbreak, people are more
likely to visit familiar recreational places, avoid the highest level of the
recreational hierarchy, and travel close distances. Interestingly, the
recreational visitations were reduced not only in the highest but also in
low-level regions. Urban areas at low levels of the recreational hierarchy were
more severely affected by COVID-19 than urban areas at high and middle levels
of the recreational hierarchy.
