Recommender Systems in Tourism Francesco Ricci Contents Introduction .................................................................. 2 Recommender System Components ............................................... 3 Preference Elicitation ........................................................ 5 Scoring and Ranking Recommendations ......................................... 6 Recommendation Refinement .................................................. 8 Key Recommendation Dimensions for Tourism RSs ................................. 10 Context-Awareness .......................................................... 10 Recommendations for Groups ................................................. 11 Sequential Recommendations .................................................. 12 Open Issues and Conclusions .................................................... 13 Cross-References .............................................................. 15 References ................................................................... 16 Abstract Recommender systems (RSs) are information search and filtering tools that provide suggestions for items to be of use to a user. They are now common in many Internet applications (Google News, Amazon, TripAdvisor), helping users to make better choices while searching for news, books, or vacations. RSs exploit data mining and information retrieval techniques to predict to what extent an item fits the user needs and wants. RSs interact with the user to fine- tune these suggestions while presenting a selection of the items, among those having the largest predicted fit score. RSs have been used in tourism applications for suggesting points of interest to visit, holiday properties, and flights, or even generating complete plans for holidays, that is, bundling different types of more F. Ricci () Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bozen-Bolzano, Italy e-mail: fricci@unibz.it © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 Z. Xiang et al. (eds.), Handbook of e-Tourism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05324-6_26-1 1