A Package Recommendation Framework for Trip Planning Activities

Classical recommender systems provide users with ranked lists of recommendations, where each one consists of a single item. However, these ranked lists are not suitable for applications such as trip planning, which deal with heterogeneous items. In this paper, we focus on the problem of recommending a set of packages to the user, where each package is constituted with a set of different Points of Interest that may constitute a tour. Given a collection of POIs, our goal is to recommend the most interesting packages for the user, where each package satisfies the budget constraints. We formally define the problem and we present a novel composite recommendation system, inspired from composite retrieval. Experimental evaluation of our proposed system, using a real-world dataset demonstrates its quality and its ability to improve both diversity and relevance of recommendations.