Picture-based Travel Recommendations

Did you know that consumers begin planning many weeks before booking, visit a dozen websites, and spend more than 10 hours before making a travel decision? This thesis shows an approach to encounter this impediment.

Picture-based Travel Recommendations
Which destination meets your personal travel preferences the best? Santa Margherita Ligure, Italy, perhaps?

Topic
With the growing popularity of self-organized travel planning and the rise of digital services, the desire for personalized online travel planning solutions has increased. Although, questions regarding the practical applicability of traveller typology and the high degree of complexity in providing personalized travel recommendations remain open. This study investigates with the research question ‘How accurate are travel pictures as an indicator for predicting travel package recommendations?’ if it is possible to conduct user profiling by using travel pictures and, in a further step, to derive personalized travel recommendations from them.

Relevance
From a practical point of view, our study shows how pictures can improve user profiling by triggering emotions and avoiding lengthy questionnaires to subsequently provide personalized travel recommendations. It examines how travel typologies are developed and, in a further step, clustered to meet the needs of a specific sample. The study furthermore demostrates the importance of pictures as link between implicitly collecting user preferences and providing personalized travel packages. Finally, practitioners extract evidence on how they need to use pictures for user profiling so they unfold their power and how to approach travel recommendations for them to be promising.

Results
The results of our first survey show that the literature-based traveller typology delivers important indications to categorize traveller groups. The findings also illustrate that further clustering is needed to consider the different characteristics of traveller categories of a specific sample. We developed an approach to determine identifier pictures that could provide the link between traveller clusters and travel packages. This finding shows the importance of pictures in the user profiling process. The results of our second survey show that the travel packages could successfully be matched the participants' preferences. They indicated, however, that travel recommendations should place a particular focus on travel activities rather than focusing primarily on destinations or accommodations .

Implications for Practitioners
Our study shows findings in several fields that may interest practitioners.

  • Pictures can be used as a transmitter of desires in a user profiling process.
  • The process of collecting user preferences can be facilitated and made more appealing to users with the help of pictures.
  • Travel recommendation systems should be built in an activity-based manner. The approach with destinations in the center seems less promising.
  • Pictures can be successfully used to link traveller types to travel recommendations and thus help to personalize travel recommendations.

Methods
To examine the research question, we conducted two surveys. One was dedicated to gathering information regarding travellers' preferences using pictures and different travel attributes. After having collected this data, we derived traveller categories through hierarchical clustering. In a further step, we developed an approach to determine identifier pictures that could provide the link between the extracted traveller clusters and the travel packages. Based on the selection of six picture pairs, three travel packages were displayed to the participants in the second survey. Within this survey, the participants evaluated with the help of Likert scales how accurately the travel packages met their preferences.