Travel Itinerary Research Articles

Factors influencing Taiwanese demand to travel abroad

Purpose – The present study analyzes how economic factors and online searching behavior influence the demand for international tourism and how to improve the relevance and prognostics between the active searching behavior and the tourism industry. Design – The study includes a tourist demand function, an econometric model, and a statistical inference, using panel data from 13 countries over a 108-month period. Methodology – This study uses a panel data model to analyze how economics and online searching behavior influence Taiwanese tourists who travel overseas. Approach – The study adopts a statistical test and inference based on the panel data model. Findings – The study’s results reveal that the effects of the consumer price index in the destination country, the Google search index for travel web pages, and the difference in the consumer price index in Taiwan are statistically significant and positively related to the number of Taiwanese overseas tourists. On the other hand, the Google search index for travel news has a negative statistical significance. Furthermore, the Google search index is statistically and significantly affected by economic variables. Originality of the research – This study adopts online searching behavior as a proxy variable to evaluate the intention to consume. In addition to economic factors, by promptly and effortlessly obtaining users’ search trends and intentions, this study then correctly predicts tourists’ demands, determines the best travel itinerary for tourists, and strengthens the quality of tourism services.

Por uma cartografia sentimental

A partir da geografia imaginária de Cidadilha, a cidade-ilha colonial de Vitória (ES), do escritor e historiador capixaba Luiz Guilherme Santos Neves, a meta é construir uma cartografia sentimental. Para tanto, criou-se a figura de um viajante-cartógrafo, que desembarcará na ilha para vivenciá-la antropofagicamente e reapresentar a ficção do ponto de vista do visitante. Ele abrirá pistas para interlocuções entre o corpus teórico (Rolnik, Certeau, Tuan etc.) e as experiências cartográf icas realizadas na concretude do objeto empírico (a cidade de Vitória). O artigo estrutura-se como roteiro de viagem, pressupondo também que Cidadilha seja uma viagem no espaço-tempo verossímil ao traçado original do (e até hoje verificável no) núcleo fundacional de Vitória.

The most reliable flight itinerary problem

Travel itineraries between many origin‐destination (OD) pairs can require multiple legs, such as several trains, shared rides or flights, to arrive at the final destination. Travelers expect transparent reliability information to help improve decision‐making for multi‐leg itineraries. We focus on airline travel and making a priori decisions about flight itineraries based on the reliability of arriving at the destination within the travel time budget. We model the reliability of multi‐leg itineraries and, given publicly available data, create probability distributions of flight arrival and departure times. We use these values in our reliability calculations for the entire itinerary. We implement a stochastic network search algorithm that finds the most reliable flight itinerary (MRFI). We also implement several ideas to improve the efficiency of this network search. Computational experiments help identify characteristics of the MRFI for a diverse set of OD pairs.

456. Discrepant Trip Experiences Among Travelers Attending a Tertiary Care Center Family Travel Medicine Clinic

BackgroundInternational travel can expose travelers to a number of health risks. Pre-travel consultation helps prepare travelers for health concerns that might arise. The assessment of risk, mitigation strategies, and relevance of pre-travel advice is dependent on whether travelers adhere to their planned travel itinerary and activities. Objectives. We aimed to determine the proportion of returned travelers whose actual travel itineraries differed from their planned travel plans (defined as discrepant trip experiences). We also aimed to identify traveler or trip characteristics associated with discrepant trip experiences.MethodsWe conducted a prospective cohort study at the Hospital for Sick Children’s Family Travel Medicine Clinic between September 2014 and December 2015. Pre- and post-trip questionnaires were compared with identify discrepant trip experiences.ResultsAmong 186 participants, 121 (65%) reported their actual travel itineraries upon their return. A preliminary analysis of 53 participants revealed a median participant age of 37 years. Most common reasons for travel were vacation (n = 29, 55%) and visiting friends and/or relatives (n = 12, 23%). Median trip duration was 17 days (IQR 13 days); most commonly visited regions were Central America (n = 19, 36%), Asia (n = 18, 34%), and South America (n = 5, 9%). In total, 51 actual travel itineraries (96.2%, 95% CI 91–100) were discrepant from the pre-travel plans that were used to make pre-travel health recommendations. Additional activities (e.g., hiking, caving) (n = 42, 82.3%) and unplanned environments visited (e.g., altitude, jungle) (n = 32, 62.7%) during travel were the trip characteristics most likely to be discrepant. We did not identify any traveler demographic features or planned trip characteristics that predicted either discrepant trip experiences.ConclusionBased on our preliminary analysis, the majority of travelers reported discrepant trip experiences. We plan to complete the analysis of the full cohort (N = 121) and also to quantify if the discrepant features meaningfully altered health risks during travel. This study informs practitioners providing pre-travel consultation to consider broader counseling as discrepancies from planned travel are common.Disclosures All authors: No reported disclosures.

Ten Practical Strategies Coaches Can Use to Promote Nutrition to Their Athletes

Coaches are often focused on the physical training and the x's and o's associated with their sport, but there are clear benefits associated with teaching and encouraging proper nutrition and hydration for optimal performance. Certainly, the benefits can be seen, but how can coaches become more educated in nutrition and pass on this information to their athletes and parents? This article highlights 10 practical strategies coaches can use to promote nutrition and suggests ways in which coaches can incorporate nutritional information into team and parent meetings, training and competition education sessions, and travel itineraries. Further, strategies to educate on daily nutritional choices are addressed. A goal of coaches is to facilitate an environment where their athletes can achieve optimal performance on a consistent basis. Therefore, this article provides both essential information and practical strategies to help achieve this goal by improving coaches' knowledge about nutrition.

Pre-travel counseling for immunocompromised travelers: A 12-year single-center retrospective review.

Immunocompromised travelers (ICTs) are medically complex and challenging for travel medicine providers. Our study hypothesizes that ICTs have high-risk travel itineraries and do not have adequate immunity against vaccine-preventable infections. This retrospective review of 321 ICTs from 2004 to 2015 included patients with solid organ transplant (SOT, n=134), connective tissue disease (CTD, n=121), inflammatory bowel disease (IBD, n=46), and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV, n=20). Variables included immunosuppressive medications, hepatitis A and B vaccination and serology, gamma-globulin use, and antimalarial and antidiarrheal prophylaxis. Chi-square analysis was used for categorical variables and Kruskal-Wallis for continuous variables. Malaria-endemic regions accounted for 38.9% (125/321) of travel destinations. High-risk activities were planned by 37.4% (120/321) of travelers. A significant proportion of HIV patients [70.0% (14/20)] visited friends and relatives, whereas other ICTs traveled for tourism. Hepatitis A and B vaccination rates were 77.3% (248/321) and 72.3% (232/321). Post-vaccination hepatitis A and B serologic testing were completed by 66.1% (41/62) and 61.1% (11/18) of travelers, respectively. ICTs demonstrate differences in travel patterns and risk. Serologic testing was uncommon, and vaccination rates were low. Providers should screen ICTs early for upcoming travel plans and advise vaccine completion prior to departure.

Understanding Changes in Tourists’ Use of Emotion Regulation Strategies in a Vacation Context

This study examines the patterns of change in tourists’ use of emotion regulation strategies (ERSs) during a vacation, and their interactions with sociodemographic characteristics. Data were collected using an online survey and travel daily diaries. Repeated measures analysis of variance showed that 152 participants exhibited significant differences in their use of five ERSs with positive emotions and two ERSs with negative emotions during their travel experience, suggesting use of ERSs varies over different stages of a vacation. In addition, some sociodemographic characteristics were found to play a significant role in explaining patterns of change in tourists’ use of ERSs with positive and negative emotions. These findings, which extend current emotion-based research in tourism, must be acknowledged by and incorporated into future research. Further, tourism professionals should account for the change in tourists’ use of ERSs during a vacation when planning travel itineraries and programs.

A Passenger-Centric Approach to Air Traffic Flow Management

Traffic flow management initiatives aim to balance the flows of vehicles in capacity-constrained transportation networks to minimize congestion costs. While existing research has focused on vehicle-centric delay minimization objectives, this may not result in most efficient outcomes from the end users' perspective when travel itineraries involve connections between multiple vehicles. This paper develops an original user-centric approach to traffic flow management. First, an analytical Markov Decision Process is presented to derive structural insights on the drivers of user-centric operations. Second, this paper augments existing air traffic flow management (ATFM) models by explicitly balancing flight delay costs and passenger delays. A large-scale integer programming model is formulated to track the impact of flow management operations on passenger accommodations. An original rolling procedure decomposes the problem over time while ensuring global feasibility, and shown to enable the model's implementation in short computational times. Computational results in the US National Aviation System suggest that this modeling and computational framework can achieve large reductions in passenger delays at comparatively small increases in flight delay costs. Analytical and computational results highlight two major levers of user-centric operations: (i) delay allocation, which determines which flights to delay or prioritize to minimize delay costs, and (ii) delay introduction, which deliberate adds departure holds to avoid passenger misconnections.

Travel-related infections in mainland China, 2014–16: an active surveillance study

BackgroundTransmission of infection through international travel is a growing health issue, and the frequency of imported infection is increasing in China. We aimed to quantify the total number of infections imported into mainland China by arriving travellers.MethodsWe actively surveyed arriving travellers at all 272 international entry–exit ports in mainland China. Suspected cases were detected through fever screening, medical inspection, self-declaration, and reporting by on-board staff. Participants completed a standardised questionnaire with questions about demographics, their travel itinerary (including detailed information about all countries or regions visited), and clinical manifestations. Nasopharyngeal swabs, sputum samples, faecal samples, vomitus, blood, and serum were collected as appropriate for diagnoses. Diagnosis was made by specific laboratory tests according to the national technical guidelines. Infections were classified as respiratory, gastrointestinal, vector-borne, blood-transmitted and sex-transmitted, or mucocutaneous. We divided arriving travellers into two groups: travellers coming from countries other than China, and travellers coming from Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. We integrated surveillance data for 2014–16, calculated incidences of travel-related infections, and compared the frequency of infections among subgroups.FindingsBetween Jan 1, 2014, and Dec 31, 2016, 22 797 cases were identified among 805 993 392 arriving travellers—an overall incidence of 28·3 per million. 45 pathogens were detected in participants: 18 respiratory (19 662 cases), ten gastrointestinal (189 cases), seven vector-borne (831 cases), seven blood-transmitted and sex-transmitted (1531 cases), and three mucocutaneous (584 cases). Both the overall number and incidence of infection were more than five times higher in 2016 than in 2014. Case numbers and incidences also varied substantially by province, autonomous region, and municipality. Overall, 17 643 (77%) infections were detected by fever screening, but 753 (49%) blood-transmitted and sex-transmitted infections were identified through medical inspection. 14 305 (73%) cases of respiratory infection and 96 (51%) of gastrointestinal infections were in tourists. Tuberculosis, hepatitis A virus, vector-borne, and blood-transmitted and sex-transmitted infections were common among Chinese labourers who worked abroad. Dengue and malaria were most commonly diagnosed in travellers arriving from Africa. 12 126 (93%) of the 12 985 cases arriving from Hong Kong, Macau, or Taiwan were respiratory infections. Hand, foot, and mouth disease accounted for 2·90% of infections in travellers from Hong Kong, Macau, or Taiwan and 0·31% of infections in international travellers.InterpretationThis report is the first to characterise the profile of travel-related infections among arriving travellers in mainland China. Our findings should increase public awareness of the potential risk of imported infections, and help health-care providers to make evidence-based health recommendations to travellers.FundingThe Natural Science Foundation of China.

Optimization approaches to support the planning and analysis of travel itineraries

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the problem of elaborating travel itineraries considering the visitors´ profiles, travel distances and costs. Other parameters such as how much the tourists value the attractions offered are particularly taken into account, as well as their preferences regarding the order of visiting these attractions. This problem can be seen as a traveling salesman problem with profits that also considers priority prizes. It is described by an optimization model based on mixed integer programming, which aims to generate itineraries that maximize the total value of the attractions visited and minimize the total travel cost involved. We present results for sets of instances based on randomly generated and real data by applying mathematical programming techniques and a tailored tabu search algorithm. To obtain the input parameters of the problem for the real cases, some statistical techniques are used to analyze the data collected, such as multivariate correspondence analysis. The resulting solutions illustrate the potential application of the proposed approach to support planning and formatting decisions of travel itineraries.

Generating Travel Itinerary Using Ant Collony Optimization

Travelling is one of the activities needed by everyone to overcome weariness. The number of information about the tourism destination on the internet sometimes does not provide easiness for oncoming tourists. This paper proposes a system capable of making travel itinerary, for tourists who want to visit an area within a few days. For generating itinerary, the system considers several criterias (Multi-criteria-based), which include the popularity level of tourist attractions to visit, tourist visits that minimize budgets or tourist visits with as many destinations as possible. To handle multi criteria-based itinerary, we use the concept of multi attribute utility theory (MAUT). The running time of multi criteria-based itinerary is not significantly different from time-based itinerary. In addition, the number of tourist attractions in the itinerary is more than time-based itinerary, because the combination of solutions from each ant becomes more diverse.

A Generative Model of Urban Activities from Cellular Data

Activity-based travel demand models are becoming essential tools used in transportation planning and regional development scenario evaluation. They describe travel itineraries of individual travelers, namely, what activities they are participating in, when they perform these activities, and how they choose to travel to the activity locales. However, data collection for activity-based models is performed through travel surveys that are infrequent, expensive, and reflect the changes in transportation with significant delays. Thanks to the ubiquitous cell phone data, we see an opportunity to substantially complement these surveys with data extracted from network carrier mobile phone usage logs, such as call detail records (CDRs). In this paper, we develop input–output hidden Markov models to infer travelers’ activity patterns from CDRs. We apply the model to the data collected by a major network carrier serving millions of users in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our approach delivers an end-to-end actionable solution to the practitioners in the form of a modular and interpretable activity-based travel demand model. It is experimentally validated with three independent data sources: aggregated statistics from travel surveys, a set of collected ground truth activities, and the results of a traffic micro-simulation informed with the travel plans synthesized from the developed generative model.

Paul's Journeys in 3D: The Apostle as Ideal Ancient Traveller

ABSTRACTTravel in Asia Minor during the Roman period was ubiquitous. The apostle Paul is used as a heuristic model of the ideal ancient traveller. His first journey in provincial Galatia— geographical Pamphylia, Pisidia, and Phrygia—is examined, particularly as it relates to suggested routes and time of travel. It will utilise Bekker-Nielsen's pioneering 3D methodology that applies Naismith's rule to produce more objective outcomes. Practical issues related to ancient travel, such as equipment, load, and weather, will also be explored. This investigation will help to refine travel times and itineraries, and thus hopefully produce more accurate Pauline chronologies.

Repackaging India’s Sacred Geography: Travel Agencies and Pilgrimage-Related Travel

Abstract This article is an attempt to open up the study of pilgrimage and tourism by concentrating on the role of travel agencies in developing Hindu pilgrimage in India. Identifying two limitations in the ongoing debate, it makes use of less-explored themes and concepts including travel menus, package tours, itineraries, day tours, circuits, and scheduling. Surveying 46 travel brochures and popular tours promoted by travel agencies in Delhi, Haridwar, and Vrindavan, it investigates how travel agencies repackage the sacred geography of Hinduism, tying it up with the broader tourist geography of India. Turning to the varied motivations of participants in day tours to pilgrimage sites, I present my analysis of the overarching developments in what I call pilgrimage-related travel. Crucially, visits to pilgrimage sites are increasingly framed as darshan tours reflecting how increased scheduling privileges darshan and donation as the principal religious act.

GeoTravel: Harvesting Ambient Geographic Footprints from GPS Trajectories

The study is about harvesting point of interest from GPS trajectories. Trajectories are the paths that moving objects move by follow through space in a function of time while GPS trajectories generally are point-sequences with geographic coordinates, time stamp, speed and heading. User can get information from GPS enable device. For example, user can acquire present location, search the information around them and design driving routes to a destination and thus design travel itineraries. By sharing GPS logs among each other, people are able to find some places that attract them from other people’s travel route. Analysis on the GPS logs can get the point of interest that is popular. By present the point of interest, user can choose travel place easily and the travel itineraries is plan based on the user preferences.

Enabling clinicians to easily find location-based travel health recommendations-is innovation needed?

The types of place names and the level of geographic detail that patients report to clinicians regarding their intended travel itineraries vary. The reported place names may not match those in published travel health recommendations, making traveler-specific recommendations potentially difficult and time-consuming to identify. Most published recommendations are at the country level; however, subnational recommendations exist when documented disease risk varies within a country, as for malaria and yellow fever. Knowing the types of place names reported during consultations would be valuable for developing more efficient ways of searching and identifying recommendations, hence we inventoried these descriptors and identified patterns in their usage. The data analyzed were previously collected individual travel itineraries from pretravel consultations performed at Global TravEpiNet (GTEN) travel clinic sites. We selected a clinic-stratified random sample of records from 18 GTEN clinics that contained responses to an open-ended question describing itineraries. We extracted and classified place names into nine types and analyzed patterns relative to common travel-related demographic variables. From the 1756 itineraries sampled, 1570 (89%) included one or more place names, totaling 3366 place names. The frequency of different types of place names varied considerably: 2119 (63%) populated place, 336 (10%) tourist destination, 283 (8%) physical geographic area, 206 (6%) vague subnational area, 163 (5%) state, 153 (5%) country, 48 (1%) county, 12 (1%) undefined. The types of place names used by travelers to describe travel itineraries during pretravel consultations were often different from the ones referenced in travel health recommendations. This discrepancy means that clinicians must use additional maps, atlases or online search tools to cross-reference the place names given to the available recommendations. Developing new clinical tools that use geographic information systems technology would make it easier and faster for clinicians to find applicable recommendations for travelers.

In Search of the Southeast: Tourism, Nationalism, and Scenic Landscape in Republican China

This paper focuses on the Southeastern Scenic Tours project, which was funded by the Nationalist government and undertaken soon after the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) had consolidated its power in the early 1930s. Drawing from newspapers, magazines, catalogs, and other material published in the Republican period, this paper looks closely at the travel routes, itineraries, and documentation that accompanied the project and examines in particular its visual representations of Chinese scenic sites, investigating how the development of transportation and the commoditization of scenic sites have been interwoven with traditional landscape aesthetics and nationalism.

Self-Planning Traveller System

This study aimed to understand the problems faced by self-planning travellers when they plan for a trip by searching travel information from the Internet and propose a system to facilitate the self-planning travellers to obtain useful travel information. An online survey was conducted via social media to understand the problems, the search criteria and types of content of travel itinerary needed in facilitating the planning. A total of 65 responses were collected. The results showed that there were too many unrelated information on the Web and travellers were unsure of where to start the search. Also, the result revealed that the search criteria needed to generate travel itinerary were travel date, travel duration, travel country and travel budget. Finally, flight schedule, hotel accommodation, sightseeing places, travelling route and things to do were the information required by travellers for their travel itineraries. Based on the results, a travel itinerary recommendation system named eTravelPlanner is proposed.

Self-Planning Traveller System

This study aimed to understand the problems faced by self-planning travellers when they plan for a trip by searching travel information from the Internet and propose a system to facilitate the self-planning travellers to obtain useful travel information. An online survey was conducted via social media to understand the problems, the search criteria and types of content of travel itinerary needed in facilitating the planning. A total of 65 responses were collected. The results showed that there were too many unrelated information on the Web and travellers were unsure of where to start the search. Also, the result revealed that the search criteria needed to generate travel itinerary were travel date, travel duration, travel country and travel budget. Finally, flight schedule, hotel accommodation, sightseeing places, travelling route and things to do were the information required by travellers for their travel itineraries. Based on the results, a travel itinerary recommendation system named eTravelPlanner is proposed.

Radziecki przewodnik turystyczny po Moskwie: retrospektywa

The article gives a brief description of Moscow guide books printed between 1922 and 1991. The retrospective of Soviet texts is preceded by tracing the origins of Moscow travel guides, which goes back to travel notes from the 16th and 17th centuries. The paper presents 34 Soviet itineraries by providing their composition and content summary. Also, it demonstrates and explains the referential and syncretic patterns of Soviet guidebooks, and the shift made at the turn of the NEP era and the 1930s. Tourism evolution, city planning and state censorship are discussed among the factors that influence travel itineraries. The diachronic approach allows to note continuity and transformation elements of Soviet travel guides to Moscow.