On planning sightseeing tours with TripBuilder

•The formal problem of planning a tourist visit as a fully-automatic two-step process.•An unsupervised method for mining common patterns of movements of tourists.•A comprehensive evaluation of TripBuilder.

We propose TripBuilder, an unsupervised framework for planning personalized sightseeing tours in cities. We collect categorized Points of Interests (PoIs) from Wikipedia and albums of geo-referenced photos from Flickr. By considering the photos as traces revealing the behaviors of tourists during their sightseeing tours, we extract from photo albums spatio-temporal information about the itineraries made by tourists, and we match these itineraries to the Points of Interest (PoIs) of the city. The task of recommending a personalized sightseeing tour is modeled as an instance of the Generalized Maximum Coverage (GMC) problem, where a measure of personal interest for the user given her preferences and visiting time-budget is maximized. The set of actual trajectories resulting from the GMC solution is scheduled on the tourist’s agenda by exploiting a particular instance of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Experimental results on three different cities show that our approach is effective, efficient and outperforms competitive baselines.