Web-based Recommenders for Personalized City Tours: A Usage Analysis (original) (raw)

2007, Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2007

The World Wide Web provides information for most tourist locations and thus has enormous influence on tourists' decisions. However, Web applications rarely support all phases of tour planning. The city of Görlitz offers website visitors an opportunity to plan individual city tours in advance by specifying personal interests and tour preferences. Using this information, the system creates a personalized tour plan with content and navigational information displayed online or sent per email as a PDF document. Analyses of the usage data indicate that most of the average use time of 9 minutes is spent looking at the recommended tour, which suggests that users had a general interest in the recommendations made. Based on the overall use behavior, two kinds of users were identified: concrete planners and destination explorers. A comparison of the web-based application with the mobile version suggests the Web a more user-friendly environment than mobile devices.