Decision support in tourism based on human-computer cloud

Abstract

Tourist mobility, high risk and uncertainty in unfamiliar environments cause the importance of information and decision support for tourists. On the other side, complex nature of tourism economic sector, intertwined with other sectors, demand for decision support methodologies and tools helping destination management organizations to plan the activities for promoting and rational development of tourist destinations. Decision support systems in tourism today leverage a variety of technologies both machine-driven and human-driven. This paper applies a novel concept of human-computer cloud as a conceptual and architectural approach to building decision support systems in tourism (both from the tourist's perspective, and from destination management organization's perspective). The main role of human-computer cloud here is to provide a convenient abstraction for computational resources, not only "ordinary" (electronic/software) ones but also human-based. In the paper, we identify the list of typical decision support tasks in tourism domain, outline possible human-based extensions of traditional kinds of decision support systems, and finally discuss how some popular decision support functions in this domain can be mapped to a multi-tiered conceptual architecture of human-computer cloud services. The proposed approach is illustrated by two usage scenarios - itinerary planning and destination visitors' survey.