Tourist services management through clients scoring using a bio-inspired agent architecture

Abstract

Tourism has become an economic engine for several countries during the last decades. Each time more and more individuals consider visiting other places during their vacation period. These places cover very different options, from the typical beach and mountain tourism to the less common urban and cultural trips. These travels hoard multiple transport means and facilities in the destination place that have to be correctly managed. Therefore, the rise of automatic systems to address the related operations and processes is a crucial issue nowadays. These systems are usually focused on the final users (the tourists) and make recommendations about their available possibilities. However, it is not easy to find a multi-purpose recommendation system covering all the needs from the perspective of the travel agency. In this paper, a complete framework called Pharaoh able to make recommendations to customers covering the final user perspective, and to provide support to the travel agents, is presented. This assistance filters the best travel, accommodation, and activity options according to the desires of the customers. This novel functionality allows selecting the customer with the best propensity to book a tourist service. This workload is distributed using a bio-inspired Multi-Agent System (MAS). Moreover, Pharaoh considers the feedback from clients after the completion of the tourist opportunity to improve future recommendations. Several experiments in real environments have been addressed to show the viability of the proposal. It can be concluded that the system enhances the quality of the service provided by the travel agency and its profits.