Design and Development of Hybrid Recommender System for Tourism

Recently, tourists transformed themselves from a passive audience to active players. Despite the variety of information regarding tourist destination or attraction, tourists are frequently not capable to cope with such a huge volume of choice. The main idea of this book is designing a tourism recommender system aimed at assisting tourists in finding a way-out in the e-tourism "chaos". This system facilitates personal selection and prevents tourists and travelers from being overwhelmed by a stream of superfluous data that are unrelated to their interest, location and knowledge of a place. In tourism domain recommendations may refer to indicate cities to go to, places to visit, attractions to see, events to participate in, road maps, options for hotels, etc. The proposed methodology may be useful to students, professionals in communication and promotion, and particularly to tourism policy-makers since it highlights the fact that the time has changed and the on-line experience has shifted from searching and consuming to creating, connecting and exchanging.