A qualitative attraction ranking model for personalized recommendations

Purpose This paper aims to find a way to personalize attraction recommendations for travelers. The research objective is to find a more accurate way to suggest new attractions to each traveler based on the opinions of other like-minded travelers and the traveler’s preferences. Design/methodology/approach To achieve the goal, developers have created a personalized system to generate attraction recommendations. The system considers an individual traveler’s preferences to construct a qualitative attraction ranking model. The new ranking model is the result of blending two processes: K-means clustering and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Findings The performance of the developed recommendation system has been assessed by measuring the accuracy and scalability of the ranking model of the system. The experimental results indicate that the ranking model always returns accurate results independent of the number of attractions and the number of travelers in each cluster. The ranking model has also proved to be scalable because the processing time is independent of the numbers of travelers. Additionally, the results reveal that the overall system usability is at a very satisfactory level. Research limitations/implications The main theoretical implication is that integrating the processes of K-means and AHP techniques enables a new qualitative ranking model for personalized recommendations that deliver only high-quality attractions. However, the designed recommendation system has some limitations. First, it is necessary to manually update information about the new tourist attractions. Second, the overall response time depends on the internet bandwidth and latency. Practical implications This research contributes to the tourism business and individual travelers by introducing an accurate and scalable way to suggest new attractions to each traveler. The potential benefit includes possible increased revenue for travel agencies that offer personalized package tours and support individual travelers to make the final travel decisions. The designed system could also integrate with itinerary planning systems to plot out a journey that pinpoints what travelers will most enjoy. Originality/value This research proposes a design and implementation of a personalized recommendation system based on the qualitative attraction ranking model introduced in this article. The novel ranking model is designed and developed by integrating K-means and AHP techniques, which has proved to be accurate and scalable.