2025 Volume 81 Issue 10 Article ID: 25-00064
This study proposes a new model of tourist trip behavior that explicitly represents travelers’ decisionmaking as the maximization of total utility over a trip chain. The proposed model introduces random utility components representing traveler heterogeneity into a structure similar to the Orienteering Problem, thereby enabling the definition of choice probabilities over trip chains. In addition, the study develops a heuristic algorithm to obtain trip chains based on the proposed model, as well as a method for estimating the model's unknown parameters. The model is applied to FF-Data, a dataset of foreign visitors to Japan, to estimate parameters and validate model performance. The results demonstrate that the proposed model exhibits a higher degree of fit to the observed data compared to a myopic Nested Logit model.
