Rainy Day Travel Planning System That Combines Tourism Potential Map with Static Characteristics of Spots

Abstract

In general, support for rainy day travel is known to be imperative during long times. Rainy weather has significant risk for tourists to terribly reduce a satisfaction level of their travel. However, its solution is not fully developed. In Post-Covid-19 environment, support for tourism in an actual field could become imperative again. In the present paper, we put one assumption that “a tourist has already made his/her travel plan for a sunny day”. By the way, there exists a social approach: ‘potential-of-interest maps for mobile tourist information services’. It shows the amounts of the numbers of the photographs in social photograph sharing system ‘Flickr’ by color and intensity on a map. This paper modifies it for support of rainy day travel planning. Concretely, we propose the following three menus in our system: 1) a menu to show ‘potential-of-interest maps' per a degree of rainfall amount, 2) a menu to show only travel spot which is robust to rainy weather based on its static characteristics, and 3) a menu to show only travel spots within a specified distance range from a basic point, taking into account decrease of behavior range. With these three menus, we try to support a tourist to change his/her travel plan efficiently even if weather suddenly becomes rain. In actual, we have evaluated our pilot system by the following two method: (1) evaluation experiment with some subjects, and (2) interviews to tourism professionals. Both of their results shows that our system would be useful in order to support for a tourist to change his/her travel plan efficiently when weather has suddenly become rain.