Collaborative information retrieval in tourism: a study of user search behaviour, user interface and information retrieval performance

Tourism information is dynamic and travel routes and decisions are dependent on highly varying factors such as perceived attractive sites, weather conditions, prices, transportation, accommodation, holidays, economic changes and so on. Travel guidebooks and present search engines completely lack this potential for dialog. Travel information search activities involved planning, decision making, anticipation of the trip with other people. The community (network of people) may act as a gateway to the information repository, when a tourist is not able to find the right information himself/herself or does not know about his/her information need. This leads to the collaboration for searching tourism information. Considering the following issues we are motivated to study this topic.