Intelligent Recommendation for Tourist Destination Decision Making

The ultimate goal of DIETORECS is to develop a recommendation system that not only it will aid the tourist destination selection process, but it will also intuitively attempt to accommodate individual preferences. Personalised recommendations based on user profile are on top of this project’s agenda, especially in the light of a severe dearth of recommendation systems available to support potential tourists choose their ideal destination.

This web-based system is set to represent an invaluable interactive and conversational tool that will support direct user data manipulation, through an array of access tools, for the selection of users’ preferred items. This in turn ensures that the definition of the final products recommended matches individual users’ expectations. In addition, this web-based system will provide product aggregation for a given destination in the form of a "travel plan", which tourists will be able to use once at the destination. This project proposes to achieve all the above by deploying state of art technologies, and to experiment with ITs never utilised before for the realisation of recommendation systems.

DIETORECS was initiated in July 2001 and is scheduled to be completed by December 2003. This project has been financed by IST (Information Society Technologies), under Key Action I, Research-line I-5.4 "Intelligent systems for improved tourism and travel services".

The DIETORECS Prototype is on-line, click here to visit it.