AI Driven Smart Tourism Platform for Personalized Safe and Sustainable Travel Planning

Abstract

Tourism planning remains challenging due to the need for group preference alignment, personalized itinerary generation, and real-time budget control, challenges that are not adequately supported by existing platforms. This paper presents an AI-driven modular framework that integrates three components: a semantic-aware group recommender that uses Sentence-BERT embeddings with a learning-to-rank model to match travelers; a hybrid itinerary planner that fuses content-based filtering, collaborative filtering, and machine-learning-based rating prediction to generate preference-aligned and geographically coherent travel plans and a predictive budgeting system that applies regression-based forecasting with live API data to provide dynamic cost estimation. The platform is developed specifically for the Sri Lankan tourism context, incorporating regional travel behavior patterns and destination characteristics into its models. Experiments indicate strong performance across all modules, including high-quality group matching, accurate itinerary prediction, and a substantial improvement in budget estimation accuracy compared with static baselines. Early user testing further highlights increased satisfaction with itinerary relevance and budget transparency. Overall, the framework demonstrates a scalable and adaptive approach to smart tourism planning, advancing personalization, collaboration, and sustainable travel support.