Smart Advisor for Tourism Packages
Abstract
An Italian company, operating in the field of tourism, has realized an e-tourism platform which is
able to automatically extract tourist packages from the tour operators database, automatically
classify them and driving the search of pre-packaged tourism offers for both travel agencies
operators and their customers. The travel agencies, which are the main target users maintain intact
their business model and, at the same time, can have the opportunity to better manage their
clients, to efficiently organise their working procedures, to reach new customers.
Description
In the last few years, the tourism industry has strongly modified marketing strategies with the
diffusion of e-tourism portals in the Internet. The effectiveness of e-tourism solutions is also
witnessed by the continuously growing community of e-buyers, who prefer to surf the Internet for
buying holiday packages. On the other hand, traditional travel agencies are undergoing a
progressive loss of marketing competitiveness.
The traditional selling process, whose strength lies in both direct contact with customer and
knowledge about customer habits, is experiencing a reduced efficiency. This can be explained, to a
large extent, by the increased complexity of matching demand and offer. Travel agencies should
manage a large number of tourism packages offered by the tour operators and available on their
servers and the agency must access on each server.
The Italian company has realized, thanks to the support of a Regional Funding Programme, a
system which is able to better manage the task of matching information with the large and
unstructured e-mail database of the agencies, reducing time-consuming and to improving the
efficiency. Consequently, the seller of a travel agency is often unable to find the best possible
solution to the customer needs in reasonable time.
The company, jointly with a group of researchers, has used a system for ontology representation
and reasoning and a semantic information-extraction tool. All data and metadata stored in the
system is positioned within a domain ontology. In particular, each “product” of the agency (such as
a destination or a hotel) is associated with ontological features and semantically linked to the other
products available in the repository.
The internal repository of the touristic offers is automatically populated as a result of a data
exchange system connected to the tour operators and of information based on the flyers that are
received by the travel agencies.
SPIN - Consorzio di Ricerca, Innovazione e Trasferimento Tecnologico s.c.r.l. –
Via Pedro AlvaresCabral, 18 – Zona Industriale 87036 Rende (CS)
Tel / Fax +39-0984-839674 - e-mail een@consorziospin.it - Web: www.consorziospin.it een.consorziospin.it
Each user/client is automatically associated with a profile that is built based on her/his products of
interests. The profile is created based on the information, which are in the travel agencies
database.
The system supports a recommendation module that proposes to each user/client the products
that she/he can be more interested. First, the suggestion directly looks at the profile of the client
and, based on it, extracts via a reasoning system from the ontology the products that can be of
interest. Moreover, the suggestion can be extended to the profiles of the clients that are the most
similar to the given one, by using ad-hoc matching strategies.
Innovations and Advantages
At the moment, there isn’t any software with similar properties. The system gives customers a
surplus value because it makes possible a perfect union between on-line and on-site booking
system and this is the focus, the key to reach easily new customers for travel agencies.
The main innovations are:
 the creation of a unique server, in which will be stored every single holiday package that
belongs to the participating travel agencies, and the creation of directories containing
personal details and previous touristic experiences of the customers;
 the smart matching between the demand of the single customer and the touristic packages
available.
The solution is a multi device (laptop, smartphone and tablet) booking and purchasing system,
custom-made for the XXI century customers. Once entered the system, using the log-in information
given by the travel agency, the customer surfs the web between the several travel opportunities,
just like if he would be in a concrete travel agency.
It identifies the specific customer, associates its profile to the available travel options and suggests
different solutions according to the customer desires, just like a real travel agent would do. The
system checks the personal profile of the customer (family situation, budget) and its travel
experience. The system also checks the climatic, political and social situation of the suggested
destinations to obtain a prevision of the customer’s choice, that is the travel solution proposal; this
travel solution proposal is elaborated according to the personal profile of the customer and taking
into account the choices of the customers that have got similar profiles.
Finally, the solution proposed allows to reduce costs, times and raise the effectiveness of travel
agencies work, enriching their portfolio of services to end users.
Collaboration sought
The company is looking for partners to implement the system on industrial scale.
SPIN - Consorzio di Ricerca, Innovazione e Trasferimento Tecnologico s.c.r.l. –
Via Pedro AlvaresCabral, 18 – Zona Industriale 87036 Rende (CS)
Tel / Fax +39-0984-839674 - e-mail een@consorziospin.it - Web: www.consorziospin.it een.consorziospin.it