Development of a Website for Recommending Tourist Attractions in Japan

Abstract

This research aimed to: 1) develop a tourism recommendation website capable of suggesting tourist attractions by region, season, destination type, and festivals in a way that suits users' preferences, and 2) evaluate user satisfaction with the developed system. The sample group consisted of 10 undergraduate students majoring in Computer Education and 20 general individuals interested in Japanese culture and tourism, selected using simple random sampling. The research instruments included the developed website and a user satisfaction questionnaire. The system was developed based on the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC), including database design using MySQL and website development using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP, implemented through Visual Studio Code and XAMPP for testing. The results revealed that the system could recommend tourist attractions according to users’ preferences in terms of season, destination type, festivals, accommodations, and travel planning. User satisfaction was found to be at a high level, with an overall average score of 4.41. Limitations of the development included the simplicity of the website design and incomplete coverage of tourist information in some regions. Recommendations for future development include integrating an automatic travel planning system using Machine Learning technology and providing multilingual support for international users.