Identifying travelers´ information needs and services for an integrated international real time journey planning system

Most of the existing internet-based journey planners provide alternative travel plans either for urban trips or interurban trips with limited geographical scope (local or regional) and international single mode trips. The objective of this paper is to identify and propose the travelers´ information requirements that should be used for designing an integrated passenger information and multimodal journey planning system covering international journeys. A methodological framework was developed for achieving this goal based on the identification and analysis of the travelers´ information needs. The data needed to implement the proposed methodology were collected through a travelers´ survey covering five European countries and China. The outcome of the proposed methodology indicated that the following types of travelers´ information services were rated with the highest weight of relative importance: travelers customized door to door international journey planning, personalized real-time alerts and travel reminders, and dissemination of travel information through the Internet and mobile phones. Similar priorities with only minor deviations were calculated for the potential information services for journey planning and execution in different countries indicating that travelers tend to reach a consensus in the information requirements for international journey planners.