Last-Minute Travel Application

In this article, we present a last-minute travel application as part of a complete VIRTUAL TRAVEL AGENCY. Each year, a significant amount of tour packages are sold as last minute tours in Germany. It is impossible for a travel agent to keep track of all the offered tour packages. Electronic-commerce applications might present the best possible tour package for a specific customer request. Traditional database-driven applications, as used by most of the tour operators, are not sufficient enough to implement a sales process with consultation on the World Wide Web. The last-minute travel application presented here uses case-based reasoning to bridge this gap and simulate the sales assistance of a human travel agent. A case retrieval net, as an internal data structure, proved to be efficient in handling the large amount of data. Important for the acceptance by customers is also the integration into the VIRTUAL TRAVEL AGENCY and the interconnections to other parts of this system, such as background information or the online car rental application.