A socially motivating and environmentally friendly tour recommendation framework for tourist groups

•A multi-day tour recommendation framework for tourist groups is proposed.•The framework receives a set of must-visit and preferred points from each tourist.•The tour is fair and covers as many preferred points as possible for all tourists.•The designed group tour is environmentally friendly and socially motivating.•Extensive experiments and a user study confirm the advantages of this framework. Traveling in a group brings various social and environmental benefits, yet members might have different (and sometime conflicting) preferences. In this study, a tour recommendation framework is proposed that receives a set of must-visit and preferred points of interest from each tourist and forms multi-day tours that cover all must-visit points. Furthermore, the framework attempts to maximize fairness among group members. This ensures all members are motivated to participate in the group tour. While generating the itinerary, the framework also guarantees that a threshold on the commuted distance, time, and monetary budget is met on each day. The benefits of this approach are the maximization of social wellbeing and minimization of energy consumption. The advantages of the proposed framework are confirmed via a test using a Foursquare dataset of two major cities of New York and Tokyo and a user study.