On the design of individual and group recommender systems for tourism

Abstract

This paper presents a recommender system for tourism based on the tastes of the users, their demographic classification and the places they have visited in former trips. The system is able to offer recommendations for a single user or a group of users. The group recommendation is elicited out of the individual personal recommendations through the application of mechanisms such as aggregation and intersection. The elicitation mechanism is implemented as an extension of e-Tourism, a user-adapted tourism and leisure application whose main component is the Generalist Recommender System Kernel (GRSK), a domain-independent taxonomy-driven recommender system. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.