Travel planning is a complex, multi-faceted decision-making process that can be supported with different web applications existing nowadays. To plan a trip, a traveller often uses multiple sources and switches from one application to another. Maps perform a valuable function and are involved throughout the whole travel process. Many aspects influence tourists' travel decisions. The same person may use various strategies to plan a trip. This presents challenges for the design of usable and effective decision-support tools. This master thesis contributes to a startup’s project that builds a novel decision support system in the context of sports travel (e.g., surfing/kitesurfing, skiing, hiking, mountaineering, etc.). The thesis aims to facilitate users’ decision-making process while planning a trip using a web-based mapping application focusing on one type of outdoor sport, hiking. The study contributes insights on what information can be relevant for making travel-related decisions and proposes how map layers and map elements can be visualized in different zoom levels. A prototype showing how decision-relevant map layers can be visualized was implemented. The prototype’s visualizations were divided into three zoom levels: so-called “Global level”, “Local level”, and “Spot level” and compared on three different basemaps: customized basemap, terrain, and satellite. The visualizations on the global and local levels are the system’s recommendations and top 10 hiking trails within the recommended areas. The visualizations corresponding to the spot level are clusters of available hiking trails based on a difficulty level, individual hiking trails, and points of interest. Besides, an itinerary with all selected items by the user is visualized by days and available on all zoom levels. A user test was conducted in order to evaluate how the proposed design works and in which ways such a system can support travel planning. While the user study with 60 participants produced predominantly positive results, the conducted user test gave ideas on how to improve the proposed visualization of decision-relevant map layers further. The most needed refinement can be to add a legend to the interface or choose another more intuitive color scheme to visualize less recommended and not recommended countries or regions on the global and local levels. Further research might go into the necessity of showing the systems’ recommendations on the local level based on geographical areas instead of administrative units to make it more hiking-relevant. The important refinement can be using a qualitative color scheme to visualize different days of the itinerary. In addition, a path of a hiking trail along with other point items (like restaurants) in the itinerary can be visualized. It is necessary to consider adding the relief to the canvas basemap since most participants preferred to see the terrain basemap on all zoom levels.     «

Travel planning is a complex, multi-faceted decision-making process that can be supported with different web applications existing nowadays. To plan a trip, a traveller often uses multiple sources and switches from one application to another. Maps perform a valuable function and are involved throughout the whole travel process. Many aspects influence tourists' travel decisions. The same person may use various strategies to plan a trip. This presents challenges for the design of usable and effec...     »