Discovering highly profitable travel patterns by high-utility pattern mining

Travel diaries have been widely used by tourism researchers to gain insights into the travel behaviors of travelers because of their rich information. However, their potentials have not been fully utilized due to the unawareness of the utility information hidden within. Existing works have mainly focused on identifying popular travel patterns in the travel diaries, while overlooking their potential profitable benefits. To fill this gap, we introduce the concept of “utility” into the analysis of travel diaries and present high-utility pattern mining technique for the effective discovery of highly valuable travel patterns. We demonstrate the benefit of this approach through a case study using a large-scale travel diary data set constructed from venue check-in data. The findings are useful for tourism managers to develop valuable travel packages. The presented approach is general and can be applied to various tourism contexts to explore highly profitable travel and purchasing patterns.