Web Site Personalization. Methods, Techniques and Applications to Travel and Tourism

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the personalization topic in the wide context of developing a web based application, with a special focus on issues related to e-commerce applications in the field of tourism. Personalization is the process of tailoring a web site to individual users' characteristics or preferences. Service providers are personalizing users' web experience because they want to offer an enhanced one-to-one solution for each single user request. This paper illustrates how the user experience is influenced and the major technologies that, behind the scene, enable personalization. Personalization effects and technologies are illustrated by referring to real world examples, extracted both from commercial products and prototypes developed in research laboratories. A longer discussion will concern a research project that the authors are involved in, which is devoted to the development of a recommendation system for destination selection and travel products bundling