Time apart while together: A smart trip design for group travelers

Liao, Zhixue; Zheng, Weimin; Lin, Zhibin

Abstract

Family or friends traveling in a group often have different preferences and some of which may conflict with each other. Existing smart tourism recommender systems have not adequately addressed this important issue. This study attempts to tackle the problem by incorporating a “joining and forking” strategy into the system design, which allows members to have certain “time apart” to enjoy their treat separately and “time together” to co-create shared experience and memory. A comparison test was conducted based on a total of 50 groups of tourists in an island destination of Kulangsu in China. The results indicate that our new design outperforms five state-of-the-art baseline methods and realize a good balance between individual experience and co-experiences with group members.

Citation

Liao, Z., Zheng, W., & Lin, Z. (2022). Time apart while together: A smart trip design for group travelers. Annals of Tourism Research, 93, Article 103374. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2022.103374

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 7, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Feb 19, 2022
• Publication Date: 2022-03
• Deposit Date: Mar 4, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 20, 2024
• Journal: Annals of Tourism Research
• Print ISSN: 0160-7383
• Publisher: Elsevier Masson
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 93
• Article Number: 103374
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2022.103374
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1212721