Off the beaten track
Nava Tintarev, Ana Flores, Xavier Amatriain · 2010
This paper presents a field study of a framework for personalized mobile recommendations in the tourism domain, of sight-seeing Points of Interest (POI). We evaluate the effectiveness, satisfaction and divergence from popularity of a knowledge-based personalization strategy comparing it to recommending most popular sites. We found that participants visited more of the recommended POIs for lists with popular but non-personalized recommendations. In contrast, the personalized recommendations led participants to visit more POIs overall and visit places "off the beaten track". The level of satisfaction between the two conditions was comparable and high, suggesting that our participants were just as happy with the rarer, "off the beaten track" recommendations and their overall experience. We conclude that personalized recommendations set tourists into a discovery mode with an increased chance for serendipitous findings, in particular for returning tourists.