PlanitGreen: A Gamified Tour Booking Platform to Promote Sustainable Travel Choices

Abstract

The tourism industry plays a significant role in the global economy but also contributes significantly to climate change through carbon emissions from transportation, accommodation, and other travel activities. As environmental concerns grow, eco-friendly tourism is gaining traction among pro-environmentalists. However, many travellers still lack awareness of the environmental impact of their choices and are often unmotivated to choose sustainable options, as they don't experience immediate benefits.

To address this issue, PlanitGreen introduces a gamified tour booking platform that makes sustainable travel easier, attractive, more rewarding, and engaging. It incentivizes eco-friendly choices through a points-based reward system, allowing travellers to earn and redeem Eco Points for booking environmentally responsible tours and unlock sustainability badges for achieving key milestones. The platform enhances transparency with sustainability metrics and enables direct contributions to climate action, through tree planting game elements. By incorporating ecogamification, this system enhances traveller engagement and motivation to make greener travel decisions.

PlanitGreen is built using ASP.NET Core MVC in a three-tier client-server architecture, ensuring scalability and maintainability. The backend is developed with C# .NET 8 and Entity Framework Core 8.0.0, interacting with a SQL Server database for efficient data management. The frontend leverages HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

By embedding sustainability features into a conventional booking app, PlanitGreen addresses a key limitation of existing standalone eco-gamified platforms, which tend to appeal primarily to users who are already invested in environmental causes. This integration enables broader engagement by presenting sustainable options within a context that users are likely to engage with regardless of their environmental priorities. Thus, the project demonstrates how thoughtful software design can drive real-world change through simple, user-focused innovation.