A tour route planning model for tourism experience utility maximization

• Main Authors: Xiongbin Wu, Hongzhi Guan, Yan Han, Jiaqi Ma
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2017-10-01
• Series: Advances in Mechanical Engineering
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1177/1687814017732309

Tourism experience has great impact on the tourist satisfaction, and therefore, tourists pay more attention to the tourism experience utility of the tour. The present problem is how to plan the tour route to maximize tourism experience utility considering tourists’ preference of attraction, time, and cost budgets. The utility function for the tourism experience, consisting of utilities of tourism activities and travel, was proposed. An optimization model for tour route planning was established with the objective function of the tourism experience utility. Then, the computational method to obtain the optimal solution was given, and the feasibility of the method was validated by an example of a tourism transportation network. Finally, sensitivity analyses were conducted by varying the parameters of the tourism experience utility. The results showed that the tourists’ preference of attraction, degree of attention to travel time, and travel cost had great influence on the tour route planning. The tourists with high value of time tend to choose transportation mode with shorter travel times, and the tourism experience utility of the tourists with high value of time was higher than that of the tourists with low value of time.