Abstract
Fueled by the help of the Internet, more and more tourists nowadays tend to plan trips by themselves in order to have trip plans that meet their preferences and convenience perfectly. However, tourists may face some problems when they plan a trip by themselves, which makes the whole trip planning process challenging and tiring. These problems include extensive tourism information, manually constructing an itinerary for a trip and difficulty in satisfying the needs of all trip participants. Therefore, a web-based trip planning system is proposed in this project to solve all these problems in order to help tourists in planning their desired trips more effectively and efficiently. This system will help users to search for attractions and restaurants in Southeast Asian countries faster by providing filtering and prioritizing features. This system also facilitates the decision-making process of tourists when choosing places to visit and restaurants by utilizing the power of word-of-mouth (reviews). Besides, this system will aid tourists by reducing the need to manually construct the itinerary for a trip. The k-means clustering algorithm will be used to auto-arrange the trip itinerary to ensure places close to each other are arranged to be visited on the same day so that tourists can save on unnecessary transport costs and time. Lastly, this system promotes collaborative trip planning by providing a platform for all the participants in a trip to discuss and plan their trip together.
Highlights
The tourism sector has a great influence in the growth and income of countries in Southeast Asia
According to UNWTO and GTERC [1], Asia and the Pacific region earned a whopping USD418 billion in tourism receipts in 2015 and Southeast Asia being one of the sub-regions accounted for 26% of those total tourism receipts
In the year 2016, the total international tourist arrivals in Southeast Asia has increased about 8% and PEN Vol 7, No 2, August 2019, pp.723- 740 reached a total of 113.3 million arrivals [1]
Summary
More and more tourists prefer to plan their trips themselves using the information available online to save on the commission paid to travel agents and have more flexibility in choosing places to visit and restaurants at a destination. The study done by Park and Jang [5] has mentioned that “choice overload” happens in tourism and having more than 22 options will probably cause people to make no choices at all or experience regret Tourists regret if they had chosen places which they found unworthy of visiting later on in the trip. The reason is that people traveling in a group may have different or even conflicting preferences on the type of attractions and restaurants they wish to visit in a trip Another reason that makes group trip planning difficult is the lack of communication between the trip organiser and the participants in the trip. Other participants in a trip are unable to be actively involved in the trip planning and give their suggestions
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
