Developing Visual Tourism Recommender Systems

Tourism recommender systems (TRS) have become popular in recent years; however, most lack visual means of presenting the recommendations. This paper presents ways of developing visual travel recommender systems (V-TRS). The two popular travel recommender systems being used today are the TripMatcher™ and Me-Print™. Tour recommendation using image-based planning using SCORM (TRIPS) is a system that aims to make the presentation more visual. It uses SCORM and CORDRA standards. Sharable content object reference model (SCORM) is a standard that collates content from various Web sites, and content object repository discovery and registration/resolution architecture (CORDRA) aims to locate and reference SCORM repositories throughout the Internet. The information collected is stored in the form of an XML file. This XML file can be visualised by either converting it into a Flash movie or into a synchronized multimedia integration language (SMIL) presentation. A case study demonstrating the operation of current travel recommender systems also is presented. Further research in this area should aim to improve user interaction and provide more control functions within a V-TRS to make tour-planning simple, fun and more interactive.

Building Visual Travel Recommender Systems and Tourism Communities for Effective User Experience

Modern information and communication technology (ICT) systems can help us in building travel recommender systems and virtual tourism communities. Tourism ICT systems have come a long way from the early airline ticket booking systems. Travel recommender systems have emerged in recent years, facilitating the task of destination selection as well activities at the destination. A move from purely text-based recommender systems to visual recommender systems is being proposed, which can be facilitated by the use of the Web 2.0 technologies to create virtual travel communities. Delivering a good user experience is important to make these technologies widely accepted and used. This chapter presents an overview of the historical perspective of tourism ICT systems and their current state of development vis-à-vis travel recommender systems and tourism communities. User experience is an important aspect of any ICT system. How to define user experience and measure it through usability testing is also presented.