Aplying Trip@dvice Recommendation Technology to www.visiteurope.com

Implementing decision support technologies in a real commercial tourism destination portal is challenging. First of all, the peculiar problems related to the tourism domain, which have been studied in the recent years in eCommerce and tourism research, must be considered. But, to provide an effective and useful tool, one must tackle additional requirements arising from the technical and operational environment, which influence not only the software development and architectural issues, but also methodological aspects. This paper describes the main choices we taken and the approach we followed to integrate the Trip@dvice recommendation technology in www.visiteurope.com, the major European tourism portal launched in March 2006, with the goal of promoting Europe as a tourist destination.