A User Interface Study on Sustainable City Trip Recommendations

The importance of promoting sustainable and environmentally responsible practices is becoming increasingly recognized in all domains, including tourism. The impact of tourism extends beyond its immediate stakeholders and affects passive participants such as the environment, local businesses, and residents. City trips, in particular, offer significant opportunities to encourage sustainable tourism practices by directing travelers towards destinations that minimize environmental impact while providing enriching experiences. Tourism Recommender Systems (TRS) can play a critical role in this. By integrating sustainability features in TRS, travelers can be guided towards destinations that meet their preferences and align with sustainability objectives. This paper investigates how different user interface design elements affect the promotion of sustainable city trip choices. We explore the impact of various features on user decisions, including sustainability labels for transportation modes and their emissions, popularity indicators for destinations, seasonality labels reflecting crowd levels for specific months, and an overall sustainability composite score. Through a user study involving mockups, participants evaluated the helpfulness of these features in guiding them toward more sustainable travel options. Our findings indicate that sustainability labels significantly influence users towards lower-carbon footprint options, while popularity and seasonality indicators guide users to less crowded and more seasonally appropriate destinations. This study emphasizes the importance of providing users with clear and informative sustainability information, which can help them make more sustainable travel choices. It lays the groundwork for future applications that can recommend sustainable destinations in real-time.