Three Alternative Approaches to Design Travelling Route : Case Study Ayutthaya

Abstract

                 The purposes of this study are: 1) To study the popular tourist routes in Ayutthaya. 2) To design a suitable route that covers interesting tourist spots in Ayutthaya province (using the shortest distance). The tools used are surveys of Thai tourists in Ayutthaya province and google maps distance tool. The route are designed using 3 approaches. 1) Sort and ordered by popularity of tourist spots 2) Greedy Algorithm 3) Travelling Salesman Problem

                   400 Thai tourists sample in Ayutthaya province surveyed consists of: Female (224 or 56%), from Bangkok metropolitan (217 or 54.25%), age between 25-35 (141 or 35.25%), private company’s employee ( 114 or 28.5%), have a budget of travel more than 2,000 per day (174 or 43.5%). The result shows the popularity of tourist destination as follows: 1. Wat Yai Chai Mongkol (74.5%) 2. Wat Mahathat (69.75%) 3. Wat Mongkol Bophit (66.4%) 4. Wat Phanan Choeng (64.25%) 5. Wat Phra Sri Sanphet (56.25%) 6. Wat Chaiwatthanaram (52.25%) 7. Bang Pa-in Palace (36.25%) 8. Chao Sam Phraya Museum (32%) 9. Wat Niwetthammaprawat (27.1%) 10. Portuguese Village (21.5%).

              Then the researcher uses the 3 approaches to design the travel route that let the travelers visit as much tourist destination as possible in 1 day or 9 hours. The result shows that the most places the tourist can visit in one day is 7 destinations. Travelling salesman approach is the best approach which give the cheapest and shortest distance route (45.95 km in 90 minutes).