User-adapted travel planning system for personalized schedule recommendation

Recently, the Internet has made a lot of services and products appear online provided by many tourism sectors. By this way, many information such as timetables, routes, accommodations, and restaurants are easily available to help travelers plan their travels. However, how to plan the most appropriate travel schedule under simultaneously considering several factors such as tourist attractions visiting, local hotels selecting, and travel budget calculation is a challenge. This gives rise to our interest in exploring the recommendation systems with relation to schedule recommendation. Additionally, the personalized concept is not implemented completely in most of travel recommendation systems. One notable problem is that they simply recommended the most popular travel routes or projects, and cannot plan the travel schedule. Moreover, the existing travel planning systems have limits in their capabilities to adapt to the changes based on users’ requirements and planning results. To tackle these problems, we develop a personalized travel planning system that simultaneously considers all categories of user requirements and provides users with a travel schedule planning service that approximates automation. A novel travel schedule planning algorithm is embedded to plan travel schedules based on users’ need. Through the user-adapted interface and adjustable results design, users can replace any unsatisfied travel unit to specific one. The feedback mechanism provides a better accuracy rate for next travel schedule to new users. An experiment was conducted to examine the satisfaction and use intention of the system. The results showed that participants who used the system with schedule planning have statistical significant on user satisfaction and use intention. We also analyzed the validity of applying the proposed algorithm to a user preference travel schedule through a number of practical system tests. In addition, comparing with other travel recommendation systems, our system had better performance on the schedule adjustment, personalization, and feedback giving.