AI-Driven Platform for Safe and Sustainable Travel Planning

This paper presents SMART-ROUTE, a unified mobile travel-planning platform designed to address the fragmentation that characterizes conventional trip preparation workflows. By consolidating itinerary generation, hotel and transport recommendations, flight information, attraction discovery, route visualization, emergency support, and an AI travel assistant within a single React Native application, the system delivers a cohesive end-to-end planning experience that existing tools — evaluated individually — do not provide. The backend, built on Node.js and Express.js with JWT authentication and MongoDB Atlas persistence, supports multi-trip storage scoped to authenticated users. Functional evaluation across varied input combinations confirms that all implemented features operate correctly at prototype scale. The work explicitly distinguishes implemented functionality from proposed functionality and does not report performance benchmarks or user-adoption figures, as these were not within the scope of the current prototype. The integration gap identified in the literature — the absence of a deployable system combining intelligent itinerary generation with navigation, emergency access, and an AI assistant — is addressed here at prototype level. Future work will prioritize quantitative performance evaluation, large-scale user studies, real-time weather integration, live pricing APIs, and progressive expansion toward a production-ready deployment. SMART-ROUTE's alignment with SDG 11 through sustainability-oriented recommendations and consolidated travel planning represents an early step toward more responsible and informed tourism behaviour.

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