An Eco-Friendly Tourism Trip Planner Driven by Z-Number Uncertainty: Evidence from Baku, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Tashkent, and Istanbul

Abstract

Deployed tourism trip planners ingest travel times and ratings as exact numbers, although routing services return travel times that vary with the hour of departure and a platform rating may rest on a handful of reviews or on hundreds of thousands. We present an eco-friendly trip planner that represents both quantities as Z-numbers, which pair a fuzzy restriction on a value with a fuzzy reliability on the evidence behind it, and that constructs them directly from routing-service observations at six departure hours and from platform review counts rather than from linguistic elicitation. A hybrid loss combines score, carbon, travel-time, and reliability terms, and an adaptive large neighborhood search returns single-day itineraries through a conversational front end. We compare the planner with a crisp-mean baseline under an identical optimizer in Baku, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Tashkent, and Istanbul, with fifteen points of interest and thirty seeds per city, and we evaluate the selected itineraries on their trip carbon and their total travel time. Pooled over 150 seed-paired runs, the planner lowers trip carbon from 3.24 to 2.61 kg (19.3%, Wilcoxon p = 0.017; city-clustered bootstrap interval 6.4% to 26.7%) and travel time from 123 to 109 minutes per trip (11.5%, p = 2.8e-10; interval 5.0% to 18.2%). The travel-time reductions survive a Holm correction in Baku, Istanbul, and Abu Dhabi; the carbon reduction is significant in Baku and large but uncertain in the dispersed catalogs of Dubai and Abu Dhabi; and neither metric changes in Tashkent. Review counts are estimates of at least 3,000 for every point of interest, so rating reliability does not vary, and with a single baseline, the results establish feasibility and direction rather than a general advantage. Code, routing caches, frozen routing tables, and per-seed results are openly released.