Promoting Sustainable Travel Through a Web-Based Tourism Support System

Abstract

In Japan, distributed travel is recently promoted in order to prevent both the problems associated with overtourism and the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in urban tourist destinations. The present study developed a tourism support system by integrating web-geographic information system (Web-GIS), recommendation system and social network services (SNS). The system has two unique key functions (the functions of tourism congestion display and tourist attraction recommendation) in order to promote distributed travel during the sightseeing planning stage. The system was operated for six weeks targeting Kamakura City in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. The evaluation results for the system performance revealed that the function of tourism congestion display can promote tourism that takes congestion periods and areas into consideration. It also showed that the function of tourist attraction recommendation can provide users with novel tourist attraction recommendations and achieve high levels of intent to visit recommended tourist attractions.