Advanced technologies in location positioning and mobile communication have been recently applied to travel data collection in many countries. There were excellent reviews of the application of travel surveys based on global positioning systems (GPSs). This paper aims to review recent technological developments in travel data collection methods using mobile phones and related communication instruments and to discuss data processing and modelling methods that have been proposed for ‘dot’data analysis. Finally, the problems and tasks in travel data collection using mobile communication instruments in the future are discussed.