iTravel: A recommender system in mobile peer-to-peer environment

Recommender systems in mobile tourism have attracted considerable interest during the past decade. However, most existing recommender systems in mobile tourism fail to exploit information, evaluations or ratings provided by other tourists of similar interests. In this research, we propose to facilitate attraction recommendation task by exploring other tourists’ ratings on their visited attractions. The proposed approach employs mobile peer-to-peer communications for exchanging ratings via their mobile devices. A cost-effective travel recommender system—iTravel—thus is developed to provide tourists with on-tour attraction recommendation. We propose three data exchange methods that allow users to effectively exchange their ratings toward visited attractions. Simulated experiments are performed to evaluate the proposed data exchange methods and a user study is conducted to validate the usability of the proposed iTravel system.

► We develop a travel recommender system iTravel for makings attraction recommendation. ► An important feature of iTravel is its ability to exchange data with other iTravels. ► The proposed methods that allow data propagating resulted in better performance. ► Users revealed that they receive useful information at right time and right place.