Calibration of sightseeing tour choices considering multiple decision criteria with diminishing reward

Abstract

For an increasing number of cities, managing tourism becomes an important task and accordingly better understanding of touristic travel patterns is required. We model the sightseeing-tour choice within a city as a utility maximization problem. For this, attractions and their intrinsic utilities as well as tourists’ preferences are evaluated over multiple dimensions in order to explain the variance in tourists’ choice of POIs (points of interest) including the visiting order. Furthermore, the choice of destinations is considered “history-dependent” in that there is diminishing marginal utility gained by visiting additional POIs. Given the many potential sights, this leads to a large combinatorial problem. We solve this with a variant of a TTDP (tourist trip design problem) with the modified distance that evaluates omitted POIs and geographical distance between estimated and observed tours. The approach is applied to revealed-preference survey data from Kyoto, Japan, where tourists stated their visited attractions among 37 touristic areas. We discuss model fit and scenarios with the existing and a modified transport network.