Using a realistic social network to improve leisure destination choice simulation

6 In developed countries, in the last years, a continuous increase of the share of trips that are 7 performed for leisure purposes could be observed. Various data sources further indicate that the 8 most important motivation behind out-of-home leisure activities is social contact. 9 On the other side, leisure remains very hard to model in simulation models, mainly because 10 it depends highly on characteristics that are difficult to observe, such as heterogeneity of taste 11 and the characteristics of leisure locations. As such, the best such models can do is to calibrate 12 the level of noise added on top of classical distance and cost based utility of travel, such that 13 simulated travel distances fit the data adequately. 14 This paper makes a first step in using the social nature of leisure travel to decrease the level 15 of noise needed to simulate leisure travel. Using a realistic synthetic population with a realistic 16 social network for Switzerland, it implements a simple model where agents have individual 17 preferences over activity locations and social contacts, and shows how this can help reproduce 18 the observed travel distances. In particular, the traveled distances for visiting social contacts, one 19 of the most important leisure types in Switzerland, are pretty insensitive to the scale of the error 20 terms and come out of the structure of the social network. 21