A Comprehensive Approach to Group Recommendations in the Travel and Tourism Domain

Abstract

The research on group recommender systems is often oversimplifying the problem of generating group recommendations, as it is usually only considering the explicit preferences of the group members and, in some cases, enriching these preferences with additional information about the individual members. In this way, an essential aspect is frequently completely neglected: the characterization of the group as an entity with a specific composition and with group-related dynamics. The goal of this paper is multifaceted, firstly, to address the limitations of state-of-the-art approaches, secondly, to describe the problem of group recommendations in a more comprehensive fashion, thirdly, to summarize the results of our previously conducted analyses as a supporting evidence of a need for richer group models, and finally, to discuss an alternative and rather novel approach to group recommendations in the tourism domain. To this end, the results of the group decision-making study with 200 participants in 55 groups are summarized and related to the seven travel factors of the picture-based recommendation system.