Personalised Cloud-Based Recommendation Services for Creative Tourism

Abstract

Mass tourism increasingly gives way to creative and niche tourism. The creative visitor is a more informed tourist, better integrating with the place of a visit, its local culture, history and people. The best ambassadors of a region are local stakeholders who are able to include their offerings within the wider cultural context of the region, as well asvisitors who enjoyed a personalised experience, tailored to their wishes, needs and interests. Recent advances in computer-assisted tourism services are well-suited to support the personalisation of the touristic product. Specifically, recommender systems make it possible to support a personalised experience by tailoring offered information and services to the specific context of an individual visit. MYVISITPLANNER is a cloud-based service employing a recommender engine to offer personalised suggestions of cultural activities and a planning tool to create valid tour plans for visitors and residents of an area. In doing so, it also addresses the need of local authorities and regional stakeholders to raise the visibility of their offerings, by providing an easy to use platform for their recording and inclusion in individual tour planning. This paper offers an overview of the underlying logic and implementation for a personalised activities recommender system, developed as part of the intelligent itineraries planning system MYVISITPLANNER. The recommender engine takes into account both a taxonomy of possible activities, as well as user preferences and past recommendations, making it capable of offering recommendations tailored to the overall visit profile.