In recent years, "free travel" has been increasingly popular. How to plan personalized travel routes based on the perspective of tourists, rather than that of tourism intermediaries, is in great need. However, some factors reflecting tourists' preferences are ignored in the related work. What's more, the evaluation about scenic spots is incomplete. Besides, real data sets are seldom used in existing works. We propose a novel route-planning method that considerate multiple factors (that is, the

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... istance between sites, initial travel position, initial departure time, time duration of tour, total cost, scores and popularities of sites) comprehensively, and routes were rated by what we call a comprehensive attractiveness index. We conducted comprehensive case studies based on the real-world data of sites from the Baidu and Xiecheng websites and found that our proposed method is feasible. It is also found that the genetic algorithm outperformed two baseline ones in terms of run time. INDEX TERMS Personalized tourism, route planning, comprehensive attractiveness index, genetic algorithm.