We are a few dedicated part time developers and writers that love to travel. Each of us has our own travel experiences and preferences. After working together on other projects we learned that we have a love and enthusiasm for all things travel. We found ourselves asking the age old question “where do you want to go” and decided to build a website to help address this need. We decided to work together to create a travel based website that visitors can use to find new places to try.
One of the challenges when deciding where to travel is defining the types of criteria to use to determine suitable places. We started researching this issue and reviewed many publications related to how people decide where to go on their next vacation. As you can imagine, this is not an easy question to answer. Each of us has our own opinions and preferences. We landed upon 4 basic criteria categories to use to help make travel destination suggestions. These categories are Travel Personality, Travel Motivation, Person Demographics and Travel Constraints. The How It Works has more details about these categories and how they are used.
Finally, we had to associate the various categories with actual destinations. We did this by using our own experiences with travel destinations, looking at existing lists associated with personalities and finally crunching through many databased with various information to associate travel locations with these categories. Some of the datasets we used include city demographics, populations, per diem rates, number and type of restaurants, user ratings, points of interest data sets to name a few.
We have the initial versions of the website ready now for your use and enjoyment. Please take a look around and send us any comments. Thanks for stopping by.
Here is a list of relevant research we used.
- Alves, P., Saraiva, P., Carneiro, J., Campos, P., Martins, H., Novais, P., & Marreiros, G. (2020). Modeling Tourists’ Personality in Recommender Systems: How Does Personality Influence Preferences for Tourist Page Attractions? Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization.
- Crompton, J. L. (1979). Motivations for pleasure vacation. Annals of tourism research, 6(4), 408-424.
- Digman, J. M. (1990). Personality structure: Emergence of the five-factor model. Annual review of psychology, 41(1), 417-440.
- Gretzel, U., Mitsche, N., Hwang, Y.-H., & Fesenmaier, D. R. (2004). Tell me who you are and I will tell you where to go: Use of travel personalities in destination recommendation systems. Information Technology & Tourism, 7(1), 3-12.
- Masthoff, J. (2015). Group recommender systems: aggregation, satisfaction and group attributes. In recommender systems handbook (pp. 743-776): Springer.
- Otoo, F. E., Kim, S., & Park, J. (2020). Motivation-based segmentation of Chinese senior travelers: The roleof preferences, sociodemographic, and travel-related features. Journal of Vacation Marketing, 26(4), 457-472.139. Pan, X.,