DEVELOPMENT OF A MULTI-DESTINATION TRAVEL “ROUTE PLANNING” APPLICATION

This research presents the development of a multi-destination travel route planning application using the geospatial data from Longdo map, an online map service designed for use in Thailand. The developed application, titled “Route Planning”, was implemented using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS for the user interface, and Kotlin for Android mobile platform development. The core functionality of the application enables users to search for points of interest within specific categories, namely Temples, Restaurants, cafes, and tourist attractions, within a 10-kilometer radius from the user’s current location, and to automatically generate optimized travel routes across multi-destination. The application was tested in three locations, namely Rajamangala University of Technology Thanyaburi (Khlong Luang District, Pathum Thani Province), Wat Thanyaphon (Lam Luk Ka District, Pathum Thani Province), and Pratu Chai area (Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya District, Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya Province). Experimental results showed that the application successfully searched for multi-destination across five distinct categories and accurately generated the corresponding travel routes. The difference in route distance compared to Google Maps ranged from 2 to 75%, depending on the routing algorithms used by each application. The sample group consisted of experts and tourists who tested the application in all three locations. The research instrument was a satisfaction evaluation questionnaire, and the data were analyzed based on the level of user satisfaction with the application using mean and standard deviation. An evaluation of the application’s suitability by 6 experts indicated a high level of satisfaction (x̅= 4.21, SD = 0.56). Similarly, a user satisfaction survey with 40 general users also revealed a high level of satisfaction (x̅ = 3.94, SD = 0.48). The researchers hope that this application will support “Route Planning” for multi-destination tourism in the future.