Integrating route attractiveness attributes into tourist trip recommendations

Tourist trip recommender systems (RSs) support travelers in identifying the most attractive points of interest (POIs) and combine the POIs along a route for single- or multi-day trips. Most RSs consider only the quality of POIs when searching for the best recommendation. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that also considers the attractiveness of the routes between POIs. For this purpose, we identify a list of important attributes of route attractiveness and explain how to implement our approach using three exemplary attributes. We develop a web application for demonstration purposes and apply it in a small preliminary user study with 16 participants. The results show that the integration of route attractiveness attributes makes most people choose the more attractive route over the shortest path between two POIs. This paper highlights how tourist trip RSs can support smart tourism. Our work aims to encourage further discussion on collecting and providing environmental data in cities to enable such applications.