Personalization of the search process in tourism [Elektronische Ressource] / Sven Döring

PERSONAL IZAT ION OF THE SEARCH PROCESS IN TOUR ISM Doctoral Thesi s Dipl .-Inf. Sven DöringFaculty of Applied Co mputer ScienceUniversity of AugsburgDoering@In formatik.Uni-Augsburg .de© Copyr ight 2008. All r ights reserved. 2Examiners: Prof. Dr. Werner KießlingProf. Dr. Bernhard Möl lerDay of oral exam ination: 09.05 .20083Abstra ct The combination of trav el and touri sm represents the leading domain for application s in B2C e-comm erce. Thus, it deserves high est attent ion. Since m ost people only have a ver y limited nu mber of vaca tion days each y ear, they have l earned t o be more dem anding abou t their trips . More and m ore they ask for bette r-per sonalized travel products inst ead of standard packages design ed by tour ist operators. Due to insuffic ient search engines and the lack of personaliza-tion, however, arranging a trip on current online tr avel portals is of ten not as easy as it should be. Even f or rather s traightforward sc enarios, s earch ing and booking a s uit able travel package can be tedious and might often take longer than 1 hour. In order to prov ide good sal es experi-ences a nd custom-tailored produc ts similar to the ones co mpetent human travel agents c an of-fer, a personalized search approach for online travel portals has been ov erdue for some time.