Building an expert travel agent as a software agent

In this article, we present an expert software agent. named Traveller, that assists users in the tourism and travel domain. This agent combines collaborative filtering with content-based recommendations and demographic information about customers to suggest package holidays and tours. The combination of techniques in this hybrid approach takes advantage of the positive aspects of each technique and overcomes the difficulties shown by each of them which used in isolation. The results obtained when evaluating the agent demonstrate the benefits of using a combined technique to specify experts' knowledge. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.