TraveLink, an AI-driven travel itinerary mobile application

• Main Author: Or, Yi Ning
• Other Authors: Kong Wai-Kin Adams
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Software::Software engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/165868
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Tourism sector has been detrimental with many businesses within the sector struggling to recover. This situation has led to Singapore’s local government bodies, tourists, businesses on the search for solutions to regrow the sector. In the age of technology-driven software solutions, TraveLink provides a solution to bring Tourism in countries back alive, starting with Singapore. TraveLink is an itinerary recommendation mobile application that is powered by AI and data-driven technology. It consists of six core functionalities, including an authentication system, questionnaire, peer preference system, itinerary generation, feedback mechanism, and operations on existing itineraries. This report details the technical implementation of TraveLink and focuses on five core contributions made to its development. The first implementation involved data collection for all aspects of destination-related data required by the application. The second implementation involved data processing and cleaning, including the conversion of destination reviews into word embeddings using Word2Vec Embedding Algorithm and clustering of these word embeddings using Agglomerative Clustering. The third implementation focused on the generation of the activity score, which is a core component of the application and serves as the foundation for the recommendation system. This score is generated by combining clusters from the previous steps and destination reviews as inputs into the Random Forest Machine Learning Model. The fourth implementation involved the implementation of operations on existing itineraries on both the front and back-end of the application. Lastly, the report details the core aspects and functionalities of the mobile application user interface, which have been developed as part of the technical implementation.