TRAVEL AND TOURISM MANAGEMENT SYSTEM USING CHATBOT RECOMMENDER

Abstract

Chatbots have gained increasing importance for research and practice with a lot of applications available today including Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri. In this paper, we present the underlying methods and technologies behind a Chatbot for e-tourism that allows people textually communicate with the purpose of booking hotels, planning trips, and asking for interesting sights worth being visit. In particular, we show how model- based reasoning can be used for enhancing user experience during a chat, e.g., in cases where too many possible selections are available or where user preferences are too restricted causing inconsistencies and as a consequence not possible answers to be provided. Besides the underlying foundations, we provide a use case from the intended tourism domain to show how such a model-based chatbot effectively can be used in practice. Key Words: travel recommendation, time sensitivity, recency effect, personalization, social media