IPS: an interactive package configuration system for trip planning

When planning a trip, one essential task is to find a set of Places-of-Interest (POIs) which can be visited during the trip. Using existing travel guides or websites such as Lonely Planet and TripAdvisor, the user has to either manually work out a desirable set of POIs or take pre-configured travel packages; the former can be time consuming while the latter lacks flexibility. In this demonstration, we propose an Interactive Package configuration System (IPS), which visualizes different candidate packages on a map, and enables users to configure a travel package through simple interactions, i.e., comparing packages and fixing/removing POIs from a package. Compared with existing trip planning systems, we believe IPS strikes the right balance between flexibility and manual effort.