The Philadelphia Convention & Visitors Bureau (PCVB) partnered with YourTour.com in the creation of a new online tour-building tool perfect for business and leisure travelers, as well as domestic and international group tour planners. The white label solution of YourTour’s trip planning technology is built directly into the PCVB’s award-winning website, www.PhiladelphiaUSA.travel. The innovative web application, which launched recently, enables travelers and tour operators to plan, customize, and share their unique travel itineraries in the City of Philadelphia after answering a few basic questions, such as when and where they want to go.

“We were really impressed with how simple this technology makes it for our visitors and customers to plan their trip, or free time, while in Philadelphia,” said Jack Ferguson, president and CEO, PCVB. “The resulting detailed itinerary recommends tourist attractions and dining options all displayed on maps using Google’s cartography tools. The user can even specify preferences like budget, activity types, group size, and specific attractions and generate an updated, more personalized tour proposal.”

The technology also allows the user to share their itineraries with friends or followers on various social networks. There are more than 300 tour, dining, shopping and other visitor activities loaded in the system with new options being added regularly.

The YourTour decision support system is driven by a sophisticated computation engine. This tour planning engine takes into account walking time, as well as attractions’ days and hours of operation, to create trip proposals that best suit the individual traveler, from budget to luxury tours. This one-of-a-kind technology led by YourTour is the fruit of more than 10 years of university research. Philadelphia is the first city to have the technology report on walking time.