Personalized Sightseeing Tours Recommendation System Ana ALMEIDA, Constantino MARTINS GECAD – Knowledge Engineering and Decision Support Group Institute of Engineering – Polytechnic of Porto Porto, Portugal
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journey plans suggestions seems to be the best alternative in order to improve tourist’s activities.
ABSTRACT When a tourist arrives to a new place (country, city or region) he would certainly appreciate to have a quite simple tool to assist him in planning his staying, according to his objectives, preferences, knowledge, budget and staying period, instead of having to look for guide prospects/bulletins which sometimes can be quite confuse, or having to follow a standardized plan which does not fulfil his needs. Nowadays personalization is becoming one of the main requisites of tourism sector. A step toward this personalization can be achieved through this work. It focuses on personalised sightseeing tour recommendation, based on tourism profile and recommendation techniques integration. Through the implementation of a Personalized Sightseeing Tours Recommendation System on city councils tourism sites and tourism kiosk style information access points, or even through tourists mobile devices such as PDA’s, tourism industry , private and governmental, namely regional tourism can be improved.
This work focuses on personalised sightseeing tour recommendation including sights, routes and users profiles, based on adaptive recommendation techniques and profile modelling integration. Adaptive recommendation strategies considering adaptive content selection based on context and user interest modelling can be an effective way to select information, giving to tourist a high level of personalisation. Route planning algorithms can combine places of interest and schedules, resulting in detailed planned itineraries for the personalised tour recommendation previously generated. With this work we intend to explore advanced methodologies based on adaptive memory programming concepts which goal is to design new neighbourhood structures that will lead to the construction of effective local search algorithms. The use of adaptive presentation techniques improves content understanding turning the system more attractive, adapting better to its users.
Keywords: Tourism, Route Planning, Recommendation, Profile Modelling.
According to a joint World Tourism Organization/United Nations (UNWTO) definition, tourism is the act of travel for the purpose of recreation and business, and the provision of services for this act. Tourism services are supplied by hotels, tour operators, travel agents and transportation companies. Tourists are people "travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes not related to the exercise of an activity remunerated from within the place visited" [2]. Nowadays mass tourism with homogenous preferences is being challenged by more individual types of travel. The demand for standardised, inexpensive mass products is still very important but the segment of individualised tourism products is growing. The emerging forms of individual travellers are tired of the mass experience, seeking opportunities for independence, cultural bonding and highly intellectual discovery [3]. These new travellers are highly aware of their consumption patterns. Even more important is the possibility to obtain information of the desired quality and quantity. The individualisation of services and information is an adequate form of reacting
Adaptive
1. INTRODUCTION It is suggested by Buhalis [1] that eTourism revolutionizes all business processes, the entire value chain as well as the strategic relationships of tourism organizations with all their stakeholders. So, it increasingly determines the competitiveness of the organization, and therefore, it is critical for the competitiveness of the tourism industry in the longer term. One of the most frequent problems faced by tourists when visiting a country, a particular region or a city is deciding what to do, where to go and how to reach there, in a limited amount of time available. The most widespread information is offered by means of guidebooks which contain general purpose references, with little relevance to the interest of a particular individual, often the tourist find himself lost among that information. Tailoring information to the interests of the visitor along with
2. TOURISM EVOLUTION
to changing consumer preferences. Suppliers can no longer offer standardised products to well identified consumers. Clients expect products and services to be tailored according to individual preferences. The integration of different modes of transport, accommodation services and attractions became crucial, since customers expect tourism services to function smoothly. Buhalis [1] states that Information and Communication Technologies have become one of the key components as well as main drivers in this process. According to Prisma report [4], tourism products and services in a near future will reach a much higher level of personalisation together with a corresponding demand. New business models are suggested, for instance the establishment of “one-stop-shop” which integrates all tourism sources of a single country, holding information on tourist products and detailed additional information, such as cultural, historical and traffic information, in order to give tourists and foreigners the possibility to explore all tourist resources a country has to offer. It is also suggested that “End-to-end” management systems could extend “one-stop-shop” solutions by providing services to tourists before, during and after their travelling. This requires the integration of all sources of services and information into one single system which, in fact is extremely hard to realise, since the tourism sector has a very heterogeneous structure with various public and private entities of all sizes and forms. Therefore, the actors involved and the sources of information are extremely fragmented, making interoperability difficult. Achieving this integration for the sake of advanced service quality will remain one of the key challenges also in the field of tourism [4]. 3. STATE OF THE ART One emergent form of tourism service offered to an individual traveller can be provided through systems which, considering traveller preferences intend to guide him during his staying, either by recommending places to visit, events to attend, or by presenting detailed planned tours. There are some approaches which tackle the planning task, like “Your tour”, a system developed by Godart [5] which allows the planning of sightseeing tour (e.g. by car or coach), from one to thirty days considering some tourist's priorities (e.g. level of hotels’ comfort, level of activities’ interest) and budget, but most tourist information systems are recommendation systems, some of which are described in the following paragraphs. TIP [6] provides information about sights to its user, based on his preferences and current location. The user interacts with the system through a handheld device (e.g. PDA or mobile phone). The user defines his profile (e.g. type of sights and type of sight information he’s interested in) which is stored by the system. The user must then provide his current location to the system and receives information about the current sight he’s visiting, as well as recommendations on nearby sights he might be
interested in visiting, bearing in mind his current location and previously visited sights. Tourist Guide [7] was developed for visitors to the Mawson Lakes campus of the University of South Australia and the North Terrace precinct in the Adelaide city center. The user interacts with the system using a Compaq Aero PDA connected to a GPS receiver. The system can be operated in three different modes: Map mode, which shows the user where he is relation to other attractions; Guide mode, which supplies the user with a map showing a tour of related attractions, and Attraction mode, which provides textual information as well as images and sound. GUIDE [8] offers tourists information while traveling in the city of Lancaster, U.K. The user interacts with the system through a Fujitsu TeamPad 7600 hand-held device and the system uses a cell-based, wireless infrastructure. Based on his current location, the user is not only able to retrieve web-based information but can also produce a customized tour of the city so he can explore it his own way. Other features include the possibility of making reservations for dinner in a restaurant and sending messages to other users or to the staff of the tourist information center. CRUMPET [9] provides the user not only with locationbased information but also with customized services and information. The user begins by supplying some demographic information to the system. The system then learns more about the user’s preferences while he’s traveling and interacting with the system itself. If, for example, the user has visited a number of parks perhaps he’d also be interested in other parks. Cyberguide [10] was developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT), Atlanta, USA. It is based on the ubiquitous computing concept and focuses on mobile devices. The user interacts with the system using an Apple MessagePad PDA. The system was designed to assist a visitor in a tour of the GIT and helps the user obtaining information about the demos in display, based on the user’s current location. The system is currently only being used indoors and has very limited tourist information and recommendation capabilities. mobiDENK [11] has been developed for a tour of the Herrenhausen Gardens in Hanover and includes points of interest on which historical information and images of the most significant features are presented on a PDA. AccessSights is a subproject of this system and is intended to provide tourist information to both normally sighted users and visually impaired people traveling in the Gardens. The user receives visual and audio information. Normally sighted users will make use of both senses to obtain information and may simply follow a guide map while blind people listen to information. The system uses loudness in order to point out the distance between the user’s current location and point of interests, by simply making the voice signal get louder as the user comes closer to the point.
4. PERSONALIZED SIGHTSEEING TOURS RECOMMENDATION SYSTEM PROPOSAL This research focuses on tour planning support, we aim at defining and adapt a visit plan combining, in a tour, the most adequate tourism products, namely interesting places to visit, attractions, restaurants and accommodation, according to tourist’s specific profile (which includes interests, personal values, wishes, constraints and disabilities) and available transportation modes between the selected products. Functioning schedules will be considered as well as transportation schedules.
preferences. Based on this knowledge and on profile groups, categorised information can be delivered according to tourist specific interests, namely events, factual information, useful tips, promotional offers, recommended places to visit and more. Such a system can be used by city councils in order to explore better their tourism resources and give tourists a personalized service, which can be very attractive and improves tourism service offer.
5. CONCLUSIONS The tour planning task can be quite complex and time consuming due to the numerous attractions to visit, restaurants to eat and hotels available, when combining this task with the selection of transportation modes to move between selected places the complexity level raises, which is generally a discouraging factor for a tourist when trying to establish a plan that fulfils his needs, including preferences, wishes and constraints. In this work we propose the development of a Personalized Sightseeing Tours Recommendation System which intends to help tourists in finding a personalized tour plan allowing them to use their time efficiently and promote the culture and national tourism.
Acknowledgements Fig 1. System Architecture To develop such a system we need to efficiently address the core of the tour planning process. Hence, we have to define an optimization model that clearly represents the described tour planning problem and design a heuristic algorithm that effectively tackles that problem. Generated tour plans will be added to a “tour box”, here the tourist has the possibility of eliminate selected attractions or add new ones, according his actual interest, motivation or availability. The system gathers knowledge about the tourist’s profiles, creating groups and stereotypes with specific interests and features, allowing characteristics inheritance. The “tour box” stores tourist’s travel history, where all the places he visited are stored, which leads to accumulated knowledge about personal profiles. This knowledge, together with tourist stereotypes offer a mean of learning about general and specific interests of tourists, so that this information can serve as a basis for studying new forms of tourist products, which can be useful for the tourism sector, namely public entities (e.g. city council) as well as for travel agencies. It will, also, be possible, for the tourist, to return information on accomplished tours. So, the system gathers knowledge about tourist’s opinions and
The authors would like to thank FCT, FEDER, POCTI, POSI, POCI, POSC and COMPETE for their support to GECAD unit, and the project PSIS (PTDC/TRA/72152/2006). REFERENCES
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