One-Day Trip Itinerary Planning for Visitors to Songkhla City

One-day trip itinerary planning has gained increasing attention in secondary cities such as Songkhla, which is renowned for its rich cultural heritage and natural attractions. However, systematic approaches to designing itineraries under strict time constraints remain limited. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of three routing methods for one-day itinerary planning in Songkhla City: (1) Nearest Neighbor Heuristic (NNH), (2) Saving Algorithm (SA), and (3) a mathematical optimization model solved using LINGO software. The analysis utilizes real-world data from ten prominent tourist destinations in Songkhla City. Results indicate that all three methods successfully generated two sub-routes, each constrained to a maximum duration of 360 minutes. Among them, the mathematical model yielded the most optimal solution, minimizing the total travel distance to 56.20 kilometers and total travel time to 619 minutes. The Saving Algorithm (SA) achieved near-optimal results (57.68 kilometers, 625 minutes), while the Nearest Neighbor Heuristic (NNH) method, although slightly less accurate (57.72 kilometers, 671 minutes), proved advantageous in terms of computational efficiency and implementation simplicity. These findings highlight the trade-off between optimality and computational effort, emphasizing the importance of selecting suitable methods based on problem scale and constraints. The study provides strategic insights into developing efficient and sustainable itinerary planning frameworks for tourism in emerging secondary cities.