Personalizing recommendations for tourists

Internet has significantly influenced the tourism sector providing a great variety of services and products online. However, the number of choices has increased so dramatically that is very difficult for the consumers to find what they are looking for. For this purpose, recommendation systems for tourism have attracted a lot of research energy and interest. The main characteristic of these systems is that they can personalize their recommendations to each user interacting with the system. Personalization is even more essential for tourism recommendation systems used in handheld devices where the screen is even smaller and the presentation capabilities are limited. This paper addresses these problems and provides some development steps for a tourism recommendation system by making a state of the art in personalized e-tourism services both in computers and handheld devices as well as a review of the user modeling and personalization techniques used in these systems. Furthermore, the theories used for the improvement of the personalization procedure in tourism recommendation systems; their applications and evaluation are discussed.