Customizing travel packages with interactive composite items

Issue Date

10-2017

Abstract

We examine the applicability of Composite Items (CIs) for generating customized travel packages consisting of Points of Interest (POIs) in a given city. CIs have been shown to serve complex information needs such as selecting books for a reading club, identifying a set of products for a promotion, or planning a city tour. In the travel domain, a synthesized view of travel options in a city can be provided with a set of cohesive CIs, each of which is covering a different region in the city. In this paper, we attempt to understand the benefit of letting users customize travel packages, and examine the relationship between customization and personalization. For personalization, we gather user preferences on POI features when available or on latent topics extracted from POI tags. For customization, we develop a framework within which a user interacts with proposed travel packages and the system suggests new CIs according to refined user preferences. Our experiments reveal a tension between personalization and the cohesiveness of items forming each CI. As a result, customization is necessary to find a balance between POI personalization and CI cohesiveness. We also show that the refined user preferences obtained from customization in one city help build better travel packages in another city.

Source or Periodical Title

Proceedings - 2017 International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics, DSAA 2017

Page

137-145

Document Type

Article

Physical Description

diagram, maps, tables

Language

English

Subject

Urban areas; Electronic mail; Transportation; Planning; Clustering algorithms; Art; Feature extraction

Identifier

DOI:10.1109/DSAA.2017.14

Digital Copy

yes

En – AGROVOC descriptors

Urban areas; Electronic mail; Transportation; Planning; Clustering algorithms; Art; Feature extraction

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