Yanlu Zhao yanlu.zhao@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor
Design of diversified package tours for the digital travel industry : A branch-cut-and-price approach
Zhao, Yanlu; Alfandari, Laurent
Authors
Laurent Alfandari
Abstract
Motivated by the revolution brought by the internet and communication technology in daily life, this paper examines how the online travel agencies (OTA) can use these technologies to improve customer value. We consider the design of a fixed number of package tours offered to customers in the digital travel industry. This can be formulated as a Team Orienteering Problem (TOP) with restrictions on budget and time. Different from the classical TOP, our work is the first one to introduce controlled diversity between tours. This enables the OTA to offer tourists a diversified portfolio of tour packages for a given period of time, each potential customer choosing a single tour in the selected set, rather than multiple independent tours over several periods as in the classical TOP. Tuning the similarity parameter between tours enables to manage the trade-off between individual preferences in consumers’ choices and economies of scale in agencies’ bargaining power. We propose compact and extended formulations and solve the master problem by a branch-and-price method, and an alternative branch-cut-and-price method. The latter uses a delayed dominance rule in the shortest path pricing problem solved by dynamic programming. Our methods are tested over benchmark TOP instances of the literature, and a real dataset collected from a Chinese OTA. We explore the impact of tours diversity on all stakeholders, and assess the computational performance of various approaches.
Citation
Zhao, Y., & Alfandari, L. (2020). Design of diversified package tours for the digital travel industry : A branch-cut-and-price approach. European Journal of Operational Research, 285(3), 825-843. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2020.02.020
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Feb 10, 2020 |
Online Publication Date | Feb 14, 2020 |
Publication Date | 2020-09 |
Deposit Date | Sep 2, 2020 |
Publicly Available Date | Feb 14, 2022 |
Journal | European Journal of Operational Research |
Print ISSN | 0377-2217 |
Electronic ISSN | 1872-6860 |
Publisher | Elsevier |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 285 |
Issue | 3 |
Pages | 825-843 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2020.02.020 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1263065 |
Files
Accepted Journal Article
(3.9 Mb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Copyright Statement
© 2020 This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
You might also like
Unified framework for choice-based facility location problem
(2024)
Journal Article
Market Thickness in Online Food Delivery Platforms: The Impact of Food Processing Times
(2024)
Journal Article
Synchronized Deliveries with a Bike and a Self-Driving Robot
(2023)
Journal Article
Downloadable Citations
About Durham Research Online (DRO)
Administrator e-mail: dro.admin@durham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search