Development of a National Tourism Web Portal with Enriched Recommender: Empirical Evidence

摘要

The paper argues the importance of creating personalized recommender, particularly in small and tourism developing countries as Macedonia. Due to the fact that tourism emerged as one of the major industries in the world economy by benefiting various sectors, each country is interested in its development. Having in mind that increasing the number of tourists is significant source of income and economic growth, meeting their preferences is inevitable. In this respect, the paper makes an attempt to justify the necessity of designing national tourism portal in order to help the tourists to identify their holiday through a recommender. So, this empirical evidence reports on practical experience gained from a successful implementation of a collaborative filtering tourism recommendation system. Moreover, software module is developed which is capable of generating a personalized list of interesting items for all visitors of a national tourism web portal.