GUIDE-ME LANKA: A Web Based Tour Planning System

Jayalath Bandara Ekanayake Anuradha Herath

Dept. of Physical Sciences and Technology Dept. of Computing and Information Systems
Faculty of Applied Sciences Faculty of Applied Sciences
Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka
Belihuloya. Belihuloya.
Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected]

Abstract
Tourism industry is one major source of income of the Sri Lankan economy. Though it is a
major source of income, a very few digital media with little information related to the Sri
Lankan context is available to assist tourists visiting in Sri Lanka. And hence they have to use
traditional tour guides, maps and other printed materials or needed to get the help of personal
tour guides. These sources of information are not sufficient to organize and plan a tour in
advanced and hence, in this project we developed an automated tour guide system integrated
with advanced features such as tour organizing or planning, navigational details, tour location
categorization, tour location recommendation.
The requirements are gathered through interviews of the stakeholders and through
observations. An accurate navigation service provided by the Google is used to implement
the tour organization and planning system. The system is implemented as an online web-
based platform, which enables tourists to plan and organize their trip well in advanced.
The system was tested with stakeholders and the expertise in the field of tourism and a
significant number of feedbacks are in the positive form.

Introduction
According to the statistics, Sri Lanka Tourism has surged to a new high record of 1,798,380
arrivals in 2015, transcending all time high hits in the history, which is an increase of 17.8%
over last year’s arrivals. Hence, the foreign exchange earnings increased by 27.72% in 2015.
Due to the rise of the tourists arrivals, tourism was able to become the third place of the
largest source of Foreign Exchange earner of the national economy in 2015. Also, the Asia
emerged as the main source of tourism to Sri Lanka in year 2015 recoding 45.7% of the total
share. Western Europe was the second source of tourism with a share of 30.7 per cent
(Annual report 2015, Sri Lanka Tourism Industry Development Authority).
The choice for destination country promotions has been influenced by web based destination
marketing in the recent years. The Sri Lankan government also identified this new trend and
proposed digital marketing tool in its tourism development strategy report 2016 [1] we
identified tour planning is a key tool for destination marketing and promotion through the
interviews with the stakeholders, observations and reading the literature. Most of the
traditional tour planning tools has been outdated with the introduction of web-based systems.
There are several tour planning systems available [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11], however,
they have not been customized to suit with Sri Lankan context. Even the official Sri Lankan

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tourism website [12] provides a limited no of services such as providing links to apply Visa
online, book air tickets on-line etc.
The intention of this project is to provide a web-based tour planning system, which is fully
suited to local context. The first page of the planning wizard is used for selecting one of the
supported travel destinations in Sri Lanka. Next, the tourist can specify the Points of Interest
(POIs). Then the system provides the best route using Google Map service with some
additional information such as distance and time taken for the trip depending on the travel
method. Furthermore, the system provides a brief description of each place recommended by
the system.

Methodology
The need of automated tour planning system, which was suitable for the local context, was
identified through interviews with professionals and other stakeholders of the tourism
industry. Furthermore, the literature and the reports published by the Sri Lankan government
highlighted the requirement of such a system.
The Rapid Application Development process model was used to develop the system as it has
several advantages. All the user requirements were considered in the system design phase.
The optimal route between two locations was calculated using Dijkstra's algorithm. Google
has implemented this algorithm and it is available as an API in the Google map service.
Several experts have reviewed this API for a long period of time and its accuracy is
guarantied and hence, this API was used in our project.
Haversine formula was used to find locations around a given point in a map. That is a user
can find all the tour locations around a particular point within a given radius.
The Haversine formula is an equation important in navigation, giving great-circle distances
between two points on a sphere from their longitudes and latitudes. It is a special case of a
more general formula in spherical trigonometry, the law of Haversines, relating the sides and
angles of spherical triangles.

Several modern web technologies were used in this project. HTML5 along with CSS3 and
JavaScript, server side scripting language were used in programming. The framework
Bootstrap was used for User Interfaces development as it provides facilities to develop more
attractive and interactive User Interfaces.

For the backend, PHP 5.5.12 was used as the fundamental server side programming language.
The latest PHP framework Laravel was used as it is an open-source PHP web framework for
the development of web applications following the model–view–controller (MVC)
architectural pattern.

JQuery Ajax was used as it exchanges small amounts of data with the server. JSON was used
in communication in between the server and the client machines. MySQL sever 5.6.17 was
used as the database server and the Apache Web server 2.4.9 was used to hos the system.

The system was tested in two scales; lab and field. Lab scale testing was done to identify the
logical errors and the runtime errors of the system. The field test was done with expertise and
the professionals of the tourism industry, to identify its functional errors.

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Results and Discussion
In this project we developed a web-based tour planning system, which will guide a tourist as
his or her preferences. The need of such a system was identified through interviews with
stakeholders and the professional of the tourism industry and from the existing literature and
reports.
The system provides number of planning functionalities for the users. The first page directs
the user to logon the system or create an account if the user is new to the system. The system
provides services only for the registered users. After login to the system, the user has the
options to start planning the trip based on his personal preferences. First, she/he needs to
enter the starting and end locations and then the intermediate cities. Furthermore, the tourist
needs to specify his trip preferences by choosing the level of his interest in particular tourist
attractions, such as museums, monuments, parks and religious sites. Moreover, the tourist can
assign visit intensity, accept the top proposed attractions and/or select her/his own favorite
POIs. The generated trip itinerary will include POIs to be visited along with specific visit
details and presented in a map together with navigation information from one POI to the
other, as well as information about which subway/bus station to take. The tourist can
regenerate the trip by removing or adding certain attractions. Finally, he can save the trip in
his account. User has the facility to rank the visited sites and this information is very useful in
future trip planning.
All the above functionalities of the system provide a grate customization level for the users.
Some important factors to be considered in tour planning are budget, personal preferences of
individual tourists in a group and context dependency planning features such as weather and
current time and hence, these factors will be taken into consideration in the future
enhancement of the system. Moreover, unforeseen event or non-regular events such as
demonstrations are happening on some cities or places where the group of tourists is
scheduled visit. The system should be aware of such unexpected events so that it triggers an
automatic trip re- planning to avoid any eventual inconveniences that might arise for the
touristic group. This factor also will be considered in future development of the system.

References
[1] http://www.news.lk/fetures/item/11559-sri-lanka-tourism-strategy-2016
[2] http://www.triptoshare.com/

[3] http://www.yoplr.com/

[4] http://www.roadtripamerica.com/

[5] mTrip Inc, www.mtrip.com, mTrip, Intelligent Travel Guides, 2011.

[6] TouristEye Inc, www.touristeye.com TouristEye Web Application, 2012.
[7] Foursquare Inc, foursquare.com. Building a recommendation engine, Foursquare style,
March 2011.

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[8] http://citytripplanner.com
[9] http://yourtour.com
[10] http://plnnr .com
[11] http://www.tripadvisor.com/
[12] The Official Sri Lanka Tourism Website. http://www.srilanka.travel/

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