GroupTravel: Customizing Travel Packages for Groups

Abstract

International audienceWe present GroupTravel, a framework that generates cus-tomized travel packages (TPs) for a group of individuals. GroupTravel implements different consensus functions proposed in group recommendation to reach agreement among members. Given a group whose members provide a travel query, GroupTravel returns k Composite Items (CIs) of Points Of Interest (POIs) that are valid, representative, cohesive and personalized. Validity is achieved by satisfying the query expressed by the group. Representativity ensures good coverage of a city. Cohesiveness reflects geographic proximity of POIs forming a CI. Personalization is achieved by choosing POIs that best match the travel preferences of group members. Additionally, group members can interact with generated TPs to customize them. With extensive synthetic experiments and user studies, we examine the benefit of personalization and the impact of different group consensus on user satisfaction. We also show that providing the ability to interact with TPs and reflecting that in the consensus yields better TPs