Published Paper Details:

Travel itinerary planning in unfamiliar destinations can be challenging due to diverse traveler preferences, time constraints, and the large number of available Points of Interest (POIs). Traditional recommendation systems typically rely on static factors such as location and popularity, often failing to capture personalized user interests and contextual constraints. This paper presents Your Smart Travel Buddy, an AI-powered travel planning platform designed to generate personalized and optimized travel itineraries. The proposed system integrates advanced natural language processing and geospatial technologies to create intelligent travel recommendations. It leverages the Gemini API for conversational intelligence and POI generation, while Mapbox API is used for geospatial mapping, travel time estimation, and route optimization. The platform is developed with a modern web architecture using Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Node.js, and Spring Boot, ensuring scalability, responsiveness, and secure user authentication. The itinerary generation process models POI sequencing as a sentence completion task inspired by transformer-based architectures, enabling the system to learn from user preferences, historical travel trajectories, and contextual constraints. The recommendation engine dynamically generates time-bound itineraries that maximize travel efficiency while aligning with user interests. Experimental evaluation and beta testing with real users demonstrate improved itinerary relevance, time efficiency, and user satisfaction compared to traditional itinerary planning approaches. The results highlight the effectiveness of AI-driven personalization in transforming travel planning into a more intelligent, adaptive, and user-centric experience.