Development of a Smart Tourism Information Chatbot for Mauritius

Abstract

Due to the current COVID-19 situation world wide, the tourism industry has been heavily im pacted worldwide. Chatbots help to minimise the spread of the virus, by limiting physical interac tion, whilst help to promote the industry and make available tourism information in an accessible fa miliar manner. This paper aims to analyse the vari ous aspects of the tourism industry and identify the gaps that need to be addressed in order to improve the customer experiences in Mauritius. The aim was deploy a tourism information chatbot that will provide the necessary information and recommen dations to tourists coming to Mauritius and attract potential tourists plan their next trip in a few steps, using off-the-shelf technologies. The main advan tage of the developed Chatbot is that is built on off the shelf technologies (Rasa, Telegram, etc), but with the ability to be further extended with APIs. Thus the chatbot developed exhibits a number of innovations for a Tourism chatbot, such as Google search, weather acquisition based on location and COVID-19 statistics.