An interactive recommender system for group holiday decision-making

Abstract

Various types of applications are available on mobile devices that support the holiday decision-making of individual tourists. However, people often travel in groups and existing applications lack the services to support the decision-making of tourists who travel in a group. In group holiday decision-making, intra-group interaction plays a major role. In this work, we design an system that provides recommendations for tourist groups based on their travel preferecnes. Meanwhile, the system allows each group member to participate in the process of such recommendation through the design of interactive features. The recommendation mechanism is based on an ontology that describes the tourism-related information of a destination. This paper presents the design idea, the development of the system (including the ontology, the aggregation strategy, the recommendation mechanism, and the interactive features), and the preliminary findings of evaluating the user experience. The results show that the system facilitates the group holiday decision-making and provides users with an engaging experience.