Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Tourism Management and Hospitality
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Τhe Internet Of Tourists: A Brand New Concept Architecture And A Prototype Community Of Travelers And Tourism Actors Powered By The Continuous Delivery Of Personalised Recommendations For Travelers Across Their Trip Life-Cycle
Vassilis Spitadakis, Ioannis Milolidakis, Antonis Karagiannakis,Odisseas Vlamakis
ABSTRACT:
Optimizing the overall visitor experience and satisfaction is a multi-factor problem, with both static and highly dynamic conditions to be considered in a multi-factor environment. It is also strongly judged by the gap between the anticipated experience and the actual one. This certainly depends on the quality of information that the traveler has in in his hands prior to his arrival, during the trip decision and planning phase up to his arrival as well as during the stay period at a destination.
There are many cases where an unknown ecosystem at the destination needs to become better known by the traveler, before he can choose and realise what the ecosystem actually offers. The opportunity for the ecosystem to become known and convince the traveler is very tight in terms of time; and many times, it needs to be prompted by the traveler who must devote time and effort to search, ask, read and combine whatever is communicated to him with his own personal tastes. It is obvious, that there is usually a long period when many trip details are known: these are the booking details and personal interests. Hence, knowing such trip details and profile features, can trigger the creation of an active information flow that can match destination offerings in terms of geography, time dependencies and specialties.
The subject of this innovative paper offers a new concept along with a prototype software demonstration where a. tourism enterprises define what they propose and which trip personas they wish to approach have their proposals be recommended b. travelers state their trip characteristics (purpose-specific type or other context i.e. couple, solo, weekender) including also personal interests, c. proposals are evaluated for their level of match with trip personas, before they become recommendations that reach the end traveler user. The content of recommendations and the timing of the relevant notifications are very specific to each trip persona, depending on personal preferences and the type of trip (business, leisure, family, couple, solo, weekender), powered by a sophisticated algorithmic engine with big data pipeline abilities. A wide range of reactions to ingested recommendations signals interest, potential purchase, enhances dissemination to other visitors, or even marks proposals with ignorance and dislikes. Additionally, sharing between travelmates and other trip owners with similar profiles creates a wider interaction between all actors, thus creating a live leveraged by the creation of well targeted proposals aiming to meet the demand. On the other hand, market reports with anonymized visualized trip persona statistics over time, reveal the demand side and can show how and what type of personal interests need to be satisfied.
The new concept is called the Internet of Tourists (IoTourists), where each individual visitor becomes a sensor of destination proposals, able to react and share. The adoption of IoTourists by a destination is a challenging task with remarkable benefits for all actors: visitors, destinations, tourism Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs).
keywords: recommendation, recommendation system, matching, trip profile, traveler persona, trip persona