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Nowadays, there are a number of online trip planning systems that make it possible to automatically generate a selection and routing plan for visiting Points of Interest (POIs) that satisfy the tourist personal interests. These systems implement various features and functionalities that aim to meet diverse tourist interest profiles. Some of the most important features that get more frequently utilized include tourist personal interest estimation, selection of POIs and path routing, mandatory POIs, dynamic recalculation of trip plan, multiple day trip planning, opening hours of POIs, budget limitations and weather dependency. In this paper, we make a survey on trip planning systems, by explaining their functionalities and features. In addition, we present an evaluation of a number of existing systems in respect to their level of adaption of the state of the art touristic trip planning features. The criteria catalog selection is made based on studies on trip planning systems. Our goal is to make a comparison between these systems and then discuss areas for future improvement.
Keywords: Trip planners, Planning functionalities, Evaluation
INTRODUCTION
The tourist life cycle consists of pre-trip, on-trip and post-trip phases [cf. Figure 1]. Nowadays, the information and communication technology more or less supports all three tourists' life cycles. In the pre-trip phase, the tourist posses a varying number of planning tools for making the needed preparations such as for example booking an accommodation1 , purchasing traveling tickets2, planning the site visits3,4,5 etc. Moreover, there is huge number of web sites or online communities [1] that, in addition to provision of support for the pre trip phase, also cover the post trip phase, e.g. capabilities for registering tourist feedback or trip experience sharing. Other comparable tools, as shown in [2], might enable the tourist to get ad hoc tourism information while she/he enjoys the journey (on trip phase), such as navigation, information about POIs, contextual information (weather, location, time) etc.
The main goal of a touristic trip planning system is to automatically plan the trip for visiting a number of Points of Interest (POI) in a travel destination. Thus, it would help the tourist to do the complicated task of planning individual visits, as well as preparation of trip itinerary. Moreover, the trip planners would take into account personal preferences...