Travel Planning

The way society communicates with each other has gone through huge changes during the years. This has led to a revolution on the process of gather and exchange information by the consumers regarding brands, products, and services. Nowadays, any person can express their opinion on their social media accounts and share it with whoever he/she wants on a global scale. It is here that Social Media Influencers (SMIs) appear, anyone with a considerably large audience on social media has the ability to influence many others to take an action. Currently, the Tourism and Travel (T&T) industry is facing unprecedented challenges due to the Covid-19 pandemic; being one of the biggest sectors worldwide, driving socioeconomic development and job creation is vital for this industry to recover as faster as possible. Many actions are being done to make that happen and one possible great tool is SMI. Shortly, this research aims to understand if SMIs can boost the T&T industry by showing that a destination and its tourism services/products are safe in this time of fear of travelling due to the pandemic.

Through an empirical study among holiday travellers, residing in the Former Soviet Union Republics, this paper presents a comprehensive view of role and impact of social media on the whole holiday travel planning process: Before, during and after the trip, providing insights on usage levels, scope of use, level of influence and trust. Findings suggest that social media are predominantly used after holidays for experience sharing. It is also shown that there is a strong correlation between perceived level of influence from social media and changes made in holiday plans prior to final decisions. Moreover, it is revealed that user-generated content is perceived as more trustworthy when compared to official tourism websites, travel agents and mass media advertising.

Comparisons of cycling have often been made between different cities and different countries but very little work has examined variations in cycling across metropolitan areas. The reinvigorated interest in cycling for urban transport, from policy makers and the public, means there is an urgent need to improve our understanding of cycling within Australian cities. To this end, the current paper explores intra-urban differences in cycling across
the metropolitan areas of Adelaide and Melbourne. The research reported on in this paper is the first part of a much larger study into the factors which influence cycling, how these factors interact with each other and whether their degree of importance
varies in different localities. Existing research shows there are five headline variables which impact on who cycles and how often: urban context; cycling context; local government policies and
programs; culture of travel; and socio-economic and demographic characteristics.

The current research focuses on socio-economic and demographic characteristics and it involved mapping the journey-to-work by bicycle using Statistical Local Areas then testing the relationship between socio-economic and demographic variables
and levels of cycling. The results show a higher concentration of cycling in the central city and inner suburbs but this pattern is not straightforward especially when disaggregated by gender. The
spatial differences in cycling frequently reported at an international and inter-city scale are also evident at an intra-urban scale. Further, differences found across Adelaide and Melbourne are only partially accounted for by socio-economic and demographic variables leaving considerable room for contextual,
cultural and local area policies to explain the difference.

The electronic management of business travel is now acknowledged to be the key-factor in reducing companies' travel-related expenses and improving their general efficiency. Internet-based technologies give corporate travel agencies the opportunity to re-engineer their role and become high value-added travel consultants. After an analysis of the mechanisms that lead both companies and travel operators to opt for an automated management system, the article describes the structure of the InTRAsystem (Internet TRAveller System) prototype, an advanced technology solution to streamline the travel process, from booking and ticketing to expense reporting and processing

Ireland’s reliance on the private car for transport is having a negative impact on the environment and public health; modal shift from driving to cycling has the potential to reduce Ireland's carbon emissions and improve public health. Irish government policy commits to an increase in the modal share of cycling from 2% to 10% and the establishment of a National Cycle Network (NCN). In this network, the length of greenways (off-road cycle trails) will be maximised, however, no guidance exists for the design, maintenance or route selection of greenways in Ireland. Furthermore, internationally, while there is diverse literature and guidelines on cycle route design, to date this has not been collated and reviewed. This paper reviews literature on the route selection, geometric design, pavement structure and maintenance of greenways from Ireland, UK, France, Denmark, USA and Australia. The review is of interest to designers, planners and other stakeholders; and can inform the develop...

Conversational recommender systems support human-computer interaction strategies in order to assist online tourists in the important activity of dynamic packaging, ie, in building personalized travel plans and in booking their holidays. In a previous paper, we presented a novel recommendation methodology based on Reinforcement Learning, which allows conversational systems to autonomously improve a rigid (non-adaptive) strategy in order to learn an optimal (adaptive) one. We applied our approach within an online travel ...

The purpose of this study is proposing a hybrid data mining solution for traveler segmentation in tourism domain which can be used for planning user-oriented trips, arranging travel campaigns or similar services. Data set used in this work have been provided by a travel agency which contains flight and hotel bookings of travelers. Initially, the data set was prepared for running data mining algorithms. Then, various machine learning algorithms were benchmarked for performing accurate traveler segmentation and prediction tasks. Fuzzy C-means and X-means algorithms were applied for clustering user data. J48 and multilayer perceptron (MLP) algorithms were applied for classifying instances based on segmented user data. According to the findings of this study, J48 has the most effective classification results when applied on the data set which is clustered with X-means algorithm. The proposed hybrid data mining solution can be used by travel agencies to plan trip campaigns for similar tr...

The electronic management of business travel is now acknowledged to be the key-factor in reducing companies' travel-related expenses and improving their general efficiency. Internet-based technologies give corporate travel agencies the opportunity to re-engineer their role and become high value-added travel consultants. After an analysis of the mechanisms that lead both companies and travel operators to opt for an automated management system, the article describes the structure of the InTRAsystem (Internet TRAveller System) prototype, an advanced technology solution to streamline the travel process, from booking and ticketing to expense reporting and processing

The visitor experience of place is inextricably linked to our ability to travel around an area at will, yet this mobility creates many
problems especially in scenic rural areas of the UK. The study presented here attempts to unravel visitors’ experiences of mobility using Moscovici’s social representations approach. Travel diaries were employed to explore visitors’ transport choices and mobility patterns during the peak season in Purbeck, Dorset, UK. Analysis focuses on how such patterns reflect a social representation of mobility and the implications this has for visitor travel at destinations.

Online communities, social networks and social media in general have been recognised as important information resource for consumers and are more and more influencing the travel planning of consumers nowadays (Gretzel & Yoo, 2008; Arsal et al, 2008). Consumers cannot only ...

This paper discusses the principle of tourism for all and highlights the fact that the market of disabled and elderly travellers is far from being a niche market. It demonstrates how destinations and suppliers of tourism-related products and services can gain competitive advantages and ...