Abstract
Sport mega-events, such as the Soccer World Cup or Olympic Games, attract many visitors from all over the world. Most of these visitors are also interested in, besides attending the sports events, visiting the host nation and the neighboring countries. In this paper, we focus on the upcoming FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022. As per the schedule of the tournament, a national team can play 7 matches at most. Therefore, a supporter will have six short breaks (of three to five days) between consecutive matches in addition to two longer ones, immediately before and after the tournament, during which they can plan some touristic trips. We study the problem faced by a touristic trip provider who wants to offer a set of touristic packages, chosen among a very large set of options, devoted to World-Cup related tourists. The number of packages offered must be limited due to organizational reasons and the necessity to guarantee a high participation in each trip. In this study, a set of user profiles is considered. It represents different categories of tourists, characterized by different preferences and budgets. Each user is supposed to pick the packages that maximize their satisfaction, considering their budget and time restraints. The goal of the company is to choose the set of packages to be offered that would maximize the average users satisfaction. To address this NP-Hard combinatorial optimization problem we provide a mathematical formulation and a matheuristic, named Consensus-Based Kernel Search (CKS), wherein an alternative rule is used to create the initial Kernel and partition variables in buckets. Computational results evidence the excellent performance of CKS and prove that the newly introduced algorithm systematically outperforms the classical Kernel Search.
Highlights
Travelling to attend sports events is a very old phenomenon that started centuries ago with the Olympic Games and has continued till today with an increasing number of world wide sport mega-events
Some studies claim that in sports mega-events, such as Olympic Games or FIFA World Cup, not all visitors are interested in attending the competition, but are accompanying relatives or friends and exploiting such visits to explore the host country and the surrounding areas
To attract this category of visitors, it is important to provide a set of touristic packages that can amplify their interest in participating in the sports event and can enrich their touristic experience
Summary
Travelling to attend sports events is a very old phenomenon that started centuries ago with the Olympic Games and has continued till today with an increasing number of world wide sport mega-events. FIFA World Cup (FWC) tournament is an example of mega-events whose purpose goes beyond the level of simple sports competitions These mega-events often present opportunities for cultural exchange, political visibility, and economic development for the organizing countries. The purpose of this paper is to help select and plan a set of touristic packages that will let the FIFA 2022 visitors plan their trips based on their preferences. It takes into account the schedule of the FWC tournament and the geographical characteristics of the host country in proposing a decision support tool that will help the FIFA 2022 participants and visitors in planning their trips.
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