Integrating tourist packages and tourist attractions for personalized trip planning based on travel constraints

In recent years, with the upgrading of mobile positioning and the popularity of smart devices, location related research gets a lot of attentions. One of popular issues is the trip planning problem. Although many related scientific or technical literature have been proposed, most of them focused only on tourist attraction recommendation or arrangement meeting some user demands. In fact, to grasp the huge tourism opportunities, more and more tour operators design tourist packages and provide to users. Generally, tourist packages have many advantages such as cheaper ticket price and higher transportation convenience. However, researches on trip planning combining tourist packages have not been mentioned in the past studies. In this research, we present a new approach named Package-Attraction-based Trip Planner (PAT-Planner) to simultaneously combine tourist packages and tourist attractions for personalized trip planning satisfying users’ travel constraints. In PAT-Planner, we first based on user preferences and temporal characteristics to design a Score Inference Model for respectively measuring the score of a tourist package or tourist attraction. Then, we develop the Hybrid Trip-Mine algorithm meeting user travel constraints for personalized trip planning. Besides, we further propose two improvement strategies, namely Score Estimation and Score Bound Tightening, based on Hybrid Trip-Mine to speed up the trip planning efficiency. As far as we know, our study is the first attempt to simultaneously combine tourist packages and tourist attractions on trip planning problem. Through a series of experimental evaluations and case studies using the collected Gowalla datasets, PAT-Planner demonstrates excellent planning effects.