Co-Existing in Differences: Tailoring Travel Itineraries for Tourists With Similar Interests

Abstract

Customized tourism is gaining more and more attention in the era of the prominent personalization of tourists. Private customization has disadvantages such as high cost and resource consumption. To save resources and costs from the three aspects of travel companies, tourists, and society, it is proposed to bring similar tourists together and customize travel itineraries for tourists. Online resource information related to tourism and transportation help companies customize the itinerary more efficiently and accurately, and the itinerary has a detailed schedule. In this method, we first cluster visitors according to their heterogeneous needs. The relevant online information collected is then combined with the needs of each visitor in the tour group to build and solve customized models of the tour itinerary. Finally, the price of the tour itinerary is determined. At the end of this paper, we discussed what level of clustering makes visitors most satisfied. It proves that this approach can be customized for tour groups. Visitors show a certain level of satisfaction with this customized format. However, the applicability of this method needs to be further verified on a larger range of data sets.INDEX TERMS Customized tourism, heterogeneous demand, tourist clustering, model optimization. I. INTRODUCTIONThe service industry plays an important role in the world economy [1]. Tourism is a kind of service industry, which provides scenic spots, accommodation, catering, and other related services [2]. Tourists' demands for tourism products are increasingly personalized [3], and the personalization of tourism products is getting more and more attention from tourism companies and tourists [4], [5]. With the advent of COVID-19, visitor preferences have changed, and capturing visitor needs has become even more important [6], [7]. Generally speaking, the customization of private tourism must take full account of the individual needs of tourists, but it also increases the cost of tourists and tourism companies. Everyone traveling alone increases the social pressure of traffic and environmental problems. Some scholars have suggested that tourism has strong resilience. With the efforts of the government, the tourism industry, and other parties, it is only a matter of time before the tourism industry recovers [8], [9]. The emergence of COVID-19 has brought about aThe associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Claudia Raibulet .