The paper presents an innovative method for tourist route planning inside a destination. The necessity of reorganizing the tourist routes within a destination comes as an immediate response to the Covid-19 crisis. The implementation of the method inside tourist destinations can bring an important advantage in transforming a destination into a safer one in times of Covid-19 and post-Covid-19. The existing trend of shortening the tourist stay length has been accelerated while the epidemic became a pandemic. Moreover, the wariness for future pandemics has brought into spotlight the issue of overcrowded attractions inside a destination at certain moments. The method presented in this paper proposes a backtracking algorithm, more precisely an adaptation of the travelling salesman problem. The method presented is aimed to facilitate the navigation inside a destination and to revive certain less-visited sightseeing spots inside a destination while facilitating conformation with the social distancing measures imposed for Covid-19 control.

An iterated function system that defines a fractal interpolation function, where ordinate scaling is replaced by a nonlinear contraction, is investigated here. In such a manner, fractal interpolation functions associated with Matkowski contractions for finite as well as infinite (countable) sets of data are obtained. Furthermore, we construct an extension of the concept of $\alpha$-fractal interpolation functions, herein called R-fractal interpolation functions, related to a finite as well as to a countable iterated function system and provide approximation properties of the R-fractal functions. Moreover, we obtain smooth R-fractal interpolation functions and provide results that ensure the existence of differentiable R-fractal interpolation functions both for the finite and the infinite (countable) cases.

We introduce a new type of mappings in metric spaces which are three-point analogue of the well-known Chatterjea type mappings, and call them generalized Chatterjea type mappings. It is shown that such mappings can be discontinuous as is the case of Chatterjea type mappings and this new class includes the class of Chatterjea type mappings. The fixed point theorem for generalized Chatterjea type mappings is proven.

We introduce two new classes of single-valued contractions of polynomial type defined on a metric space. For the first one, called the class of polynomial contractions, we establish two fixed point theorems. Namely, we first consider the case when the mapping is continuous. Next we weaken the continuity condition. In particular, we recover Banach’s fixed point theorem. The second class, called the class of almost polynomial contractions, includes the class of almost contractions introduced by Berinde [ Approximating fixed points of weak contractions using the Picard iteration , Nonlinear Anal. Forum 9 (2004), no. 1, 43–53]. A fixed point theorem is established for almost polynomial contractions. The obtained result generalizes that derived by Berinde in the above reference. Several examples showing that our generalizations are significant are provided.