2011 IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE)

TripFromTV+: Exploiting Social Networks to Arrange Cut-Price Touristic Packages

Y. Blanco-Fernndez, M. Lopez-Nores, J. J. Pazos-Arias, J. Garcia-Duque, M. I. Martn-Vicente Department of Telematics Engineering, University of Vigo, Spain.
Abstract Tourists need advice about what to do in their

trips. Bearing in mind the wide adoption and influence of social technologies from Web 2.0, we propose a tourism recommender system that offers tourist packages with two features: (i) they include the attractions and activities that best match the users preferences, which are inferred from their profiles in social networks, and (ii) these packages have a reduced price if they are purchased by a number of users defined by the tourism providers registered in our system. To gather those many purchasers, we exploit the diffusion mechanisms of social networks, through which users make existing offers known to their contacts. Package providers benefit from novel profitable business options, while users enjoy personalized, permanently updated, reliable and on-move tourism offers, which can be accessed from fixed and handheld consumer devices. I. INTRODUCTION Tourists often need advice about where to go and what to see and to do in a specific destination, hence the fact that personalization capabilities are undoubtedly valuable for them. With the irruption of the Web 2.0, social networks have become in very influential elements in the users decisionmaking [1], who resort to social communities to find opinions about accommodation options, tourist attractions to visit, etc. In view of tourism information overload, in [2] we presented TripFromTV, a recommender system enhanced by reasoning mechanisms that automatically infers the tourist attractions potentially appealing to a user, starting from the kind of Digital TV contents he/she enjoyed. Bearing in mind the current widespread adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, in this paper we propose TripFromTV+, an enhanced version of our first system endowed with a component grounded on social networks, which works as an intermediator between users and tourism providers. Besides sharing opinions and forming interest groups with like-minded individuals, the novelty is that the users can spread among their contacts (friends) information about tailor-made tourist packages, which can be purchased with a reduced price if the system brings together (at least) a number of users required by the package provider. Actually, our system works as a finder of tourists and of providers. In the first case, TripFromTV+ automatically contacts to users whose preferences match the cut-price packages entered by the providers; in the second, the system looks for providers who are in the position to make an offer for a group of like-minded users, who are automatically
Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science research project TIN2010-20797.

located in the social networks. For personalization purposes, the system exploits both the users viewing histories (like in TripFromTV [2]) and the preferences from their profiles in social networks. The paper is organized as follows: section II describes the main functionalities of TripFromTV+. Next, section III explains the mechanisms used to identify whom users to notify when a provider enters a new offer. Before concluding the paper, section IV focused on implementation and evaluation. II. MAIN FUNCTIONALITIES Our system handles a database with information about: (i) providers and their offers, and (ii) users and interest groups they form. The offers consist of a list of attractions included in the tourist package, the (reduced) price, the applicability period of the offer and the number of users required by the provider. The elements involved in the system, along with interactions with users and providers are depicted in Figure 1.

Fig. 1. Our tourism recommender system grounded on social networks

An essential element in the system is the reasoning-driven personalization engine, which relies on a hybrid strategy (half content-based and half collaborative) that has been improved to match the preferences of a group of users (modeled in their profiles) against the metadata of the resources included in the cut-price packages registered by the tourism providers (whose semantic descriptions are represented in an ontology). A. Tourist Packages Providers The tourism providers rely on B2B access interfaces to (i) enter new offers in the system database, (ii) query the existing ones, (iii) remove these offers, and even (iv) review the interest groups formed by the users to detect overlapping between their preferences and the providers offers. For example, if the system finds a group of users who are lovers of

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nature, sports and South America, it might contact to Adventure in Costa Rica that provides a mixed tour with hill walking and cycling in the Tapanti Natural Park. B. Users As depicted in Figure 1, users access the social component of TripFromTV+ through a client application that explores minutely the social networks they are logged into, searching for information about what the users are doing and about their contacts activity in the social community. Information about preferences and interests is exploited by the feedback agent to update the users profiles, thus being a complement to the DTV viewing histories received from their set-top boxes via a 2.5/3G communication network (see [2]). The client application allows the users to: (i) join a group of users interested in buying the cut-price tourist package entered by some provider, (ii) spread this offer among their contacts, and (iii) ignore it. In case of joining an offer, the payment module of the system requests the users to provide their bank information as a surety in order to prevent the users from backing out offers they had initially joined. By adopting the diffusion mechanisms of social networks (newsfeed and variants), the users make the available cut-price tourist packages known to their contacts/friends. The tracker module of our system takes charge of (i) trailing the traceability of each offer at the hand of the users, and (ii) defining measures about their social influence. As we explain next, such measures are critical to spread new offers and gather together the number of users required by the providers. III. SELECTING USERS TO SPREAD NEW OFFERS The system must decide which users target to convince more individuals to purchase a given tourist package, and trigger a large cascade of further purchases. This process assigns a suitability level to each user, so that the best users are those with the highest values. Given a cut-price package, the indexes computation is driven by three main parameters: First, a high matching level between a users preferences and the attractions included in the package increases his/her suitability level (e.g. a lover of animals would be a good candidate to spread a tourist package involving visits to a zoo and an aquarium). Second, the existence of an interest group about attractions similar to those included in the package helps to increase the suitability level of the members of that group (e.g., if the package includes water activities and there is an interest group with lovers of diving, the system infers they might be interested in that package and in spreading to like-minded friends through the social networks). Third, the most influential users in TripFromTV+ will be those with a great number of contacts and a high level of activity in the social networks (e.g. users who joined many tourism offers in the past, who contributed to spread many packages that were finally purchased by the number of users established in the providers offer, etc). To quantify social activity, we have combined [3] with graph

theory metrics, such as centrality, degree, betweenness, etc.

IV.

IMPLEMENTATION AND EVALUATION

We have developed our system as a 520 KB Java package to be executed on fixed and handheld devices, which accesses a web server that lodges the reasoning-driven personalization engine, the domain ontology and the users profiles. The social component incorporated into TripFromTV+ has been implemented as a resident application in the development platform of the social network Facebook. To this aim, we have used PHP and MySQL to manage the providers database; FQL to query the Facebook database and get information about users, their preferences and contacts; and FBML to access the newsfeed and keep the tracker module informed about what the users contacts are doing in the social network. For testing purposes, we have recruited a set of 95 users from among (under)graduate students, their relatives and friends, who filled a form by indicating some initial preferences and allowed the system to access their profiles in social networks. During 15 days, users received and spread to their contacts fictitious offers including attractions whose metadata were extracted from the system ontology, which was populated with the most emblematic tourism resources of up to 14 European cities. After the 15-days validation period, the users were asked about various aspects of our system, such as personalization quality, utility and usage intention. Briefly, we found that nearly 81% of users appreciated the recommended tourist attractions and contributed greatly to spread our offers among their social contacts (reaching up to 1,200 users during the testing period). More than 90% of users revealed that they would be willing to pay for a personalization system grounded on social networks like ours, which undoubtedly confirms its potential utility for the tourism field. V. CONCLUSIONS We have described a system which can be seen in the field of consumer electronics as a step forward in the nextgeneration of tailor-made tourism systems, standing out because of (i) the exploitation of synergies among ontologydriven reasoning mechanisms, Digital TV capabilities and communication networks, and (ii) the adoption of social networks as efficient mechanism for the propagation of onmove personalized tourism offers. REFERENCES
[1] [2] Ofcom: Office of Communications, Social Networking A quantitative and qualitative research report into attitudes, behaviours and use, 2008. Y. Blanco-Fernndez, M. Lpez-Nores, J. J. Pazos-Arias, A. Gil-Solla, and M. Ramos-Cabrer, Exploiting Digital TV Users Preferences in a Tourism Recommender System based on Semantic Reasoning, Proc. of International Conference of Consumer Electronics, 2010. D. Kempe, J. Kleinberg, and E. Tardos, Maximizing Spread of Influence through a Social Network,Proc. of International Conference on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 2003, pp. 137-146.

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