Recommender systems applied to the tourism industry: a literature review

Abstract

Recommender systems -RS- have experienced exponential growth in various fields, especially in the tourism sector, improving tourism activities’ accuracy, personalization, and experience, thus strengthening indicators such as promotion. However, some challenges and opportunities exist to overcome, such as the lack of data on emerging destinations wishing to adopt these solutions. This manuscript presents a literature review of the current trends in RS applied to the tourism industry, including categories associated with their use and emerging techniques. Likewise, it presents a pathway for implementing an RS when insufficient data are available for a destination. The SLR followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines and used the WoS, Science Direct, and Scopus databases. The results show that the hybrid RS integrates deep learning algorithms, data analytics, and optimisation techniques with collaborative tourism features to provide innovative solutions in terms of performance, accuracy, and personalisation of recommendations, thus achieving the management of tourist destinations or tourism-oriented services. Emerging destinations that lack RS data in tourism should use various data sources generated by tourists on social media, tourism portals, and through their interaction with tour operators. New tourism recommender system solutions can emerge following trends integrating new technologies based on user experience, collaboration, and the integration of multiple data sources.