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

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.(c) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This study addresses the issue of conflicting preferences among family or friends traveling in a group by incorporating a joining and forking strategy into the system design. The results show that the new design outperforms existing methods and achieves a good balance between individual and group experiences.