Using a four-step heuristic algorithm to design personalized day tour route within a tourist attraction

The design of personalized day-tour routes for tourists plays a fundamental role in improving tourists’ travel experiences, and it is a crucial practice for managers of tourist attractions in an increasingly competitive marketplace. This study constructs a tourist recommendation system with consideration for aesthetic fatigue and variable sightseeing value. A four-step heuristic algorithm (involving a genetic algorithm and a difference evolution algorithm) is proposed, which serves as the nucleus for a new system to deal with the tourist trip design problem. To evaluate the performance of this algorithm, a case study was conducted at the Jiuzhai Valley in Sichuan, China. The results of paired sample t-tests indicated that the proposed heuristic algorithm indeed performed significantly better than existing methods. Furthermore, the study showed that our proposed system was able to design more realistic and better personalized routes for tourists than previous systems.