Enhancing Tourist Experience via Automatic Personalized Route Suggestions

Navigating the streets of a new city in search of points of interest (POIs) can be challenging for tourists since they are not familiar with the place. The challenge is even more pronounced for foreigners who do not speak the language of the visited city, making navigation and understanding local signage more difficult. This article presents an approach called TourTracer for estimating tourist routes and providing optimal routing services based on the paths taken by other tourists and on their preferred POIs, enriching the overall travel experience. To achieve this goal, a novel methodology has been designed, which, modifies the Dijkstra's algorithm with the insertion of two heuristics, namely the tourists frequency and the POIs preference, which take into account the routes tourists usually traversed through a city and their personal tastes in matters of places to visit. This method aims to enhance the experience of navigating unfamiliar urban environments, making it easier for visitors to explore and discover attractions. The proposed approach was evaluated by using over 200 routes from 53 different tourists, who have been monitored while visiting the city of Viterbo (Italy). These routes were then given as input to the designed algorithm to optimize the routes of future tourists exploring the city. Afterwards, the proposed approach has been tested with 12 new tourists, to whom the system recommended different paths based on the place of different POIs. The satisfaction with the recommended routes was measured through a questionnaire, yielding very positive results.