Multistakeholder fairness in tourism: what can algorithms learn from tourism management?

Abstract

Algorithmic decision-support systems, i.e., recommender systems, are popular digital tools that help tourists decide which places and attractions to explore. However, algorithms often unintentionally direct tourist streams in a way that negatively affects the environment, local communities, or other stakeholders. This issue can be partly attributed to the computer science community's limited understanding of the complex relationships and trade-offs among stakeholders in the real world. In this work, we draw on the practical findings and methods from tourism management to inform research on multistakeholder fairness in algorithmic decision-support. Leveraging a semi-systematic literature review, we synthesize literature from tourism management as well as literature from computer science. Our findings suggest that tourism management actively tries to identify the specific needs of stakeholders and utilizes qualitative, inclusive and participatory methods to study fairness from a normative and holistic research perspective. In contrast, computer science lacks sufficient understanding of the stakeholder needs and primarily considers fairness through descriptive factors, such as measureable discrimination, while heavily relying on few mathematically formalized fairness criteria that fail to capture the multidimensional nature of fairness in tourism. With the results of this work, we aim to illustrate the shortcomings of purely algorithmic research and stress the potential and particular need for future interdisciplinary collaboration. We believe such a collaboration is a fundamental and necessary step to enhance algorithmic decision-support systems toward understanding and supporting true multistakeholder fairness in tourism.