Personalization of Multi-day Round Trip Itineraries According to Travelers’ Preferences

AbstractTravel planning is a long and tedious process for tourists since it requires processing a vast amount of information. Recommender systems can be used to facilitate the process of scoring points-of-interests (POIs) according to the travelers’ interests and creating feasible itineraries. However, itinerary planning is personal and each itinerary created must reflect the interest of the traveler as well as his/her travel style. In this paper, we extend the creation of multi-day round trip itineraries by adding different personalization options such as the pace of the traveler and diversity level of the route. The information about the travel style of the user is used to personalize the visiting duration of each POI and to create routes for each day that follow the constraints defined by users. We conducted a user study through a mobile application and the results show that the added personalization options improved the recommended multi-day round trip walking tours from a user’s perspective.