ATSR: distance and time based advanced tour sequence recommendation system

The systems that filter the information and help the users in opting the desired items based on their previous transactions are the recommender systems. These systems are vital and are currently being used widely in various areas of social importance—tourism being one of them. Using a recommendation technique in travel and tourism related activities enhances the quality of decision making and gives the best possible recommendation for visiting various places. The traditional travel recommendation system (TRS) lacked in providing the tour recommendations as per the traveller’s choice and no other details about the surrounding places were furnished. Only the most popular or highly ranked tourist spot was recommended by them and no sequence to visit the nearby places was given. In this paper, a special type of TRS called advanced tour sequence recommender (ATSR) is proposed that outshines the other traditional TRSs. ATSR not only allows the user to select place of interest (POI) from the list of most popular tourist attractions in a city along with the suggestions to visit the other nearby POIs, but also gives a convenient sequence of visiting the nearby POIs based on travel distance and visiting hours of the POIs, best time of visit, cost etc. The recommendation results of the ATSR are compared with the place ratings and reviews given by Google. It was found that the ATSR has high coverage accuracy and average mean precision (AMP) values compared to the Google ratings.