User Preferences in Tourist Itineraries Recommendation

One of the most interesting current challenges in the e-tourism field is to offer services that are able to suggest attractions or event itineraries that fit tourist’s needs and preferences. In this scenario, we defined a method for generating itineraries of intangible cultural heritage events (processions, special markets, festivals, and so on) based on a theoretical model and the transitive closure computation. The method was, then, implemented, in a knowledge-based recommender system prototype, named T-Path, which is able to suggest event itineraries in Apulia region (in southern Italy). In this paper we propose an approach to identify the itineraries that best fit the tourist/user preferences. At this aim, first of all the type of each itinerary is discovered, and then the itineraries are ordered on the basis of their adequacy to the tourist preferences.