Personalized and Community Decision Support in eTourism Intermediaries

The rapidly growing web technologies and electronic commerce applications have stimulated the need of personalized and group decision support functionalities in eTourism intermediary systems. The goal of this paper is to propose a functional framework and design process for building a webbased customer-oriented decision support system to facilitate personalized and community tourism services. Major decision support functions include personalized data and model management, information search and navigation, product/vendor evaluation and recommendation, do-it-yourself travel planning and design, community and collaboration management, auction and negotiation, as well as trip tracking and quality control. A system implementation approach as well as a system prototype will also be presented and discussed.