TraveLLaMA: A Multimodal Travel Assistant with Large-Scale Dataset and Structured Reasoning

Tourism and travel planning increasingly rely on digital assistance, yet existing multimodal AI systems often lack specialized knowledge and contextual understanding of urban environments. We present TraveLLaMA, a specialized multimodal language model designed for comprehensive travel assistance. Our work addresses the fundamental challenge of developing practical AI travel assistants through three key contributions: (1) TravelQA, a novel dataset of 265k question-answer pairs combining 160k text QA from authentic travel sources, 100k vision-language QA featuring maps and location imagery, and 5k expert-annotated Chain-of-Thought reasoning examples; (2) Travel-CoT, a structured reasoning framework that decomposes travel queries into spatial, temporal, and practical dimensions, improving answer accuracy by 10.8\% while providing interpretable decision paths; and (3) an interactive agent system validated through extensive user studies. Through fine-tuning experiments on state-of-the-art vision-language models (LLaVA, Qwen-VL, Shikra), we achieve 6.2-9.4\% base improvements, further enhanced by Travel-CoT reasoning. Our model demonstrates superior capabilities in contextual travel recommendations, map interpretation, and scene understanding while providing practical information such as operating hours and cultural insights. User studies with 500 participants show TraveLLaMA achieves a System Usability Scale score of 82.5, significantly outperforming general-purpose models and establishing new standards for multimodal travel assistance systems.