A Field Trial to Elicit Individual Preferences in the Context of a Mobile Dynamic Tour Guide

Knowing tourists’ individual preferences provides the possibility to offer personalised tours. The challenge is to capture these preferences using a mobile device. During a field study in Görlitz three methods for preference elicitation were evaluated. The results served to clarify fundamental questions en route to developing a personal tour guide: 1) Is it possible to seed interest profiles in the mobile context with all its distractions that allow the accurate prediction of actual rankings of sights? and, 2) Are the interest profiles sufficiently diverse to base personalized tours on individual interest profiles instead of interest prototypes? The results suggest that choice among simple categories constitutes the most effective means of capturing user preferences and that standard tours would not adequately represent the wide array of interest profiles identified.