The impact of mainstream tourist hotels on destination economies is clearly an important question for public policy-makers wishing to develop robust tourism policy. We adapt the methodology of value chain analysis to measure the local economic impact of a large, single tourism enterprise, to show how to generate commercially realistic data using the example of an analysis of a 1,000 room AllInc...

In his recent, light-hearted article “The Grand Tour”, New Yorker journalist Evan Osnos writes of his time with a Chinese tour group in Europe [12]. Osnos describes a group of thirty eight closelychaperoned tourists undertaking a breakneck bus tour, covering five countries in ten days. He argues that Chinese tourists have formed a distinctively Chinese “grand tour” of Europe. This tour includes...

The Stochastic Eulerian Tour Problem (SETP) seeks the Eulerian tour of minimum expected length on an undirected Eulerian graph, when demand on the arcs that have to be serviced is probabilistic. In an earlier paper, we have shown that the SETP is NP-hard and derived several properties of the optimal tour. In this paper, we develop three constructive heuristics for the SETP. The first two are gr...

Ranking over sets arise when users choose between groups of items. For example, a group may be of those movies deemed 5 stars to them, or a customized tour package. It turns out, to model this data type properly, we need to investigate the general combinatorics problem of partitioning a set and ordering the subsets. Here we construct a probabilistic log-linear model over a set of ordered subset...

In the Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problem, a set of points in the plane is given, and we look for a shortest closed curve through these lines (a \tour"). We treat two special cases of this problem which are solvable in polynomial time. The rst solvable case is the N-line Traveling Salesman Problem, where the points lie on a small number (N) of parallel lines. Such problems arise for example i...

The watchman route of a polygon is a closed tour that sees all points of the polygon. Computing the shortest such tour is a well-studied problem. Another reasonable optimization criterion is to require that the tour minimizes the hiding time of the points in the polygon, i.e., the maximum time during which any points is not seen by the agent following the tour at unit speed. We call such tours ...

This paper investigates the determinants of player performance as measured by scoring average on the Professional Golf Association of America (PGA) tour for the 2012 season. Among other findings, this research shows that the percentage of greens reached in regulation (GIR) and putts per round (PPR) are by far the most important determinants of scoring average on the PGA tour. We choose in this ...

The following article examines different educational systems for tour guides in Slovenia as well as abroad. Based on the survey carried out among tour guides and tours managers in Slovenia their opinion on the usefulness of knowledge gained in the process, their viewpoint on the current form of education and the level of difficulty of obtaining a license for a tour guide or tour manager was inv...

Trip planning is both challenging and tedious for tourists due to their unique interest preferences and various trip constraints. Despite the availability of online resources for tour planning and services provided by tour agencies, there are various challenges such as: (i) selecting POIs that are personalized to the unique interests of individual travellers; (ii) constructing these POIs as an ...