Developing a Visualisation Tool for Tour Planning

Travel Recommender Systems (TRS) are increasingly becoming popular to support the tourism industry. A TRS allows tourists to get an informed recommendation for travel planning via an artificial intelligence based engine. Current TRSs do not provide tourists with the facility to visualise their complete holiday itinerary; i.e. location, transportation, accommodation, attractions and entertainment etc. The tourist has to browse through individual web pages to build a mental picture of the planned tour. Our aim is to develop a system that would allow the tourists to visualise their plan within the TRS to enhance their tour planning experience. The Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) provides the ability to create interactive and reusable content. Even though the SCORM standard was originally created for Learning Management Systems (LMSs), we postulate that it can be used for developing a tour visualisation tool. With the increase in the number of tourists using online information systems to plan and structure holidays, research and development has responded with the development of Travel Recommender Systems. However, current TRSs cannot provide the facility to visualise a complete tour as the content available on different web sites cannot be combined into a single presentation. The Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) can be used as the base model to create interactive and reusable content for visualising information. We build on the SCORM standard to development a Tour Recommendation using Image-based Planning (TRIP) system model that can provide tourists with a visual experience of their proposed travel itinerary. The TRIP system would enhance the user’s experience and involvement in holiday planning, and improve the reusability of tourism information. It can be envisaged that, as the TRIP system will facilitate the process of tour planning and visualisation, it will give a substantial boost to tourism.