Tourist trip planning with priority discipline

In recent years, the tourism industry has experienced robust growth and plays a crucial role in the economy. Tourist congestion is a common issue that can significantly affect service quality. To maintain a high level of service in congested environments, many attractions offer priority services, such as the VIP services commonly offered in malls or amusement parks, which grant priority access to specific customers and allow them to reduce or even eliminate waiting times. By integrating such priority discipline, businesses can enhance the satisfaction of high-priority tourists while improving profitability. In this paper, a new tourist trip design problem that incorporates two priority discipline strategies is introduced, for the first time representing the priority discipline as constraints within the model to ensure that the solutions strictly adhere to the discipline. To address this problem, a branch-and-bound algorithm is proposed for solving small-scale instances, and an adaptive large neighborhood search algorithm is developed to efficiently handle large-scale instances, with a customized heuristic rule used to determine the visiting orders at each attraction. The effectiveness of both algorithms is demonstrated through experimental results. Finally, parameter analysis is conducted for the model, and several managerial insights are obtained.