Tourism is a leading industry worldwide that represents a big proportion of the worldwide GDP, according to Staab and Werthner (2002). The constant growth on this industry has influenced innovations on the distribution networks that come available to the final consumer. Staab and Werthner (2002) explains that because tourism is based on mobility, all the sides (supply and demand) must be connected worldwide to form a network of information, where production and distribution are based on mutual cooperation. Staab and Werthner (2002) adds that tourism is an information-based industry, where at the moment of decision-making, customers only have access to information about the product and not the product itself. Staab and Werthner (2002) explain that traditionally, when customers wanted to book a holiday pack, they had to physically go to a travel agency to find something that would be available at the time of the visit. Today, the modern tourist, have access to a variety of destinations and packages from different travel agents, and so they don’t just try one or two services, but they can compare prices and services of all kinds through the internet. Such users have now become their own travel agents, and this shift has urged distributed systems on the internet to become more sophisticated to attend the demand of the modern tourist. Technology developments that have been occurring over the years have changed the way people interact with a travel planning. There are now websites that can compare prices online, give recommendations in bundling products and give the consumer a personalized plan with individualized pricing, examples of these could be TripAdvisor or Expedia. There is also this thing called Semantic Web, which according to W3C Organization (2013), is a web of data drawn from diverse online sources and are organized and controlled by applications, keeping them into their own formats to eventually be integrated and combined into an unending set of databases that are connected by being about the same thing. Semantic Web applications allow these travel websites to collect the right data and showcase it to consumers in a correct and appropriate way. Intelligent Systems must be developed in a way which works, so it will understand and interpret what the person is searching for and generate an appropriate result. Tourism is a very important field of intelligent system applications, because it is very complex to achieve, and this complexity comes from the very large number of tourists worldwide. This huge amount of cross information being processed increases the risk of uncertainty in some locations and it can potentially affect the quality of decision making in tourism, notes Gretzel (2011). In addition, Minić et al (2014) explain that the European Commission has identified intelligent systems as an important tool to support the complex tourism value chain, but also to “address the objectives of the expectations of the population and socio- culturally diverse customers (mass market) with unpredictable behavior” (European Commission, 2003). References:
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