An Empirical User Study on Congestion-Aware Route Recommendation

Overtourism has become a significant concern in many popular travel destinations around the world. As one of considerable approaches to handle the overtourism issues, congestion-aware methods can be effective in mitigating overcrowding at popular attractions by spreading tourists to less-visited areas. However, they may lead to a potential Hawk-Dove game: tourists who share the same preference may have some of them assigned worse routes than others to avoid congestion, which raises a possibility that the tourists who are assigned to relatively unfavorable routes may feel dissatisfaction and unfairness. Most existing research focuses on alleviating congestion from an overall planner perspective through simulation studies, with little emphasis on actual user experience. In this study, we conducted a user survey on congestion-aware route recommendation in Kyoto, Japan, aiming to investigate the evaluation of congestion-aware route recommendation methods from each tourist’s personal perspective and to clarify the development status and future research directions of congestion-aware route recommendation methods. We choose five congestion-aware route recommendation methods that vary in their consideration of congestion and multi-agent interactions. We reveal the strengths and weaknesses of these methods from multiple aspects. We cluster the respondents based on their text responses and explore the differences between these clusters. Furthermore, we investigate the factors affecting tourists’ experience and compare the differences among groups of tourists.