When WPI undergraduates first arrive in Venice, they are "visitors" like the 15+ million other foreigners who visit the city every year. However, within a couple of weeks, WPI students already consider themselves "locals" and speak disparagingly of tourists. Over the years, WPI students have made useful contributions to the study of the impact of tourism on the city, being the first to count day-tripping tourists and to explore their choice of transportation upon arrival.

However, what was not created was a student-originated guidebook made available to all young visitors to the city. But it's never too late! New tools like wikis, blogs, collaborative ratings and RSS feeds give more power to implement this idea now. The Visiting Venice team worked with these tools to create an all-inclusive tourist website.

Moreover, Dr. Donato Concato, the director of the Azienda di Promozione Turistica in Venice, is working to receive a grant for a web 2.0 site for tourists which not only suggests itineraries based on explicit or implicit preferences, time availability and geographic extent, but that also "profiles" tourists and suggests sites, hotels, restaurants, etc. based on the preferences and reviews provided by people with similar profiles. This year's Visiting Venice team has helped in the development of the grant proposal by producing a prototype of the website 2.0 design.

The Visiting Venice team has also collaborated with Professor Michele Tamma, professor of business economics at the University of Venice in Ca'Foscari and his Ph.D. student Anna Moretti on the functionality and feasibility of the website design. And lastly, the students have collaborated with Laura Sabbadin and Bruno Nogara, professional tour guides of Venice to better understand tourists and to film narratives for the website.

The above description is Professor Fabio Carrera's blog entry about the Visiting Venice project on August 16, 2008 http://venice2point0.blogspot.com/2008/08/visiting-venice.html

Divertimi: A Tourist's Guide to a Unique and Enriching Experience

Homepage of Divertimi

This project lays a foundation for the development of an e-tourism website by Azienda di Promozione Turistica della Provincia di Venezia, the provincial tourism authority in the Veneto region of Italy. Our design employs individual and group profiling to recommend destinations and attractions. Social networking and various forms of user-generated narratives support travel recommendations. Finally, we propose a system for offering a personalized trip package based on user interests.

Executive Summary

Figure 1:Key Compnents of Divertimi Website Design

Figure 2: Photorganizer: Profile Based on User's Connection to Photos

As fun and relaxing as a vacation may be, the trip planning process involved is quite the opposite. To help with this process many travelers turn to reliable e-tourist resources, such as TripAdvisor. However, TripAdvisor neglects many key components necessary to fully accommodate travelers. A truly all inclusive e-tourism website would consist of personalization for both an individual user and a group as well as customized recommendations on the local and regional scale. It would also include a social networking component and the convenience of downloadable narratives and itineraries. Therefore, our group proposed the design as displayed in Figure 1, of an innovative and unique tourism website that offers a personalized travel experience for each individual tourist. Our ultimate tourist website design, “Divertimi”, focuses on satisfying the desires and accommodating the needs of each individual by using his or her personal preferences.

Throughout the design of our website, we chose to focus on the Veneto region of Italy as our case study. One city of the Veneto region in particular, Venice, hosts 15 million tourists per year and caters to approximately 34 million visitor nights per year . These factors make Venice a prime city for the focus of our tourism website

Figure 3: Friends and Family Networking Page of Divertimi

Our prototype website design includes a profiling component as displayed in Figure 2 where the user’s connection to photos dictates his tourist profile. The idea of the photo-based profiler came from the article, Photo-Based User Profiling for Tourism Recommender Systems . We also added enhancements to our profiling component by including a rating system of these photos, similar to Netflix’s video rating system for new users. Not only does our system design create an individual profile, but it also allows for the generation of a group profile through the combination of individual profiles. Our profiling component provides for customization and personalization for the user either when traveling alone or when traveling with a group or family.

Our website design also incorporates a unique social networking component as displayed in Figure 3 where the user can communicate with family and friends and share travel advice. We included a social networking component similar to that of Facebook. We also included a collaborative filtering component similar to that of Amazon.com, which creates a “neighborhood” of similar users by grouping together users with similar interests, or in our case, similar profiles. The social networking component of our design allows users to receive helpful advice and opinions from close friends as well as from users who have similar interests. In addition, the Divertimi design includes a unique trip-planning component where attractions are recommended to the user both on the local and regional scale as displayed in Figure 4 and Figure 5.

Figure 4: Local Trip Planner (left),Figure 5: Regional Trip Planner(right)

Our recommender system uses 17 different tourist personalities taken from the literature to categorize tourists. Each tourist has a unique combination of these personalities, which comprises his or her tourist profile. Similarly, attractions have profiles; to recommend appropriate attractions, the profile of the user is matched with the profile of the attractions. Users have various options for choosing attractions and each decision the user makes alters his or her profile accordingly. Therefore, the more the tourist uses the site, the more customized his or her recommendations become. On the regional scale, cities are suggested to the user according to the number of specific attractions that match his or her profile within the city. The recommender system of our website design offers customized suggestions to the user based on his or her personal preferences.

Our site design also includes a booking function similar to that of Orbitz and Expedia but with an enhanced feature. Our booking component recommends entire trip packages to the user on a multi-city scale. It suggests the best order to visit cities and best means of transportation based on time, price and special activities occurring on certain occasions.

Figure 6:Narrative Page of Divertimi

Lastly, our website offers narratives, as displayed in Figure 6, that are downloadable to mobile devices in video, audio, or text format so the user can take this information on vacation. Our narrative component relies heavily on the idea of crowdsourcing, similar to YouTube and Digg.com where users maintain the website by posting content and adding comments and ratings. This feature provides useful information for the user by displaying other user’s feedback as well as facts about a specific location while at the desired destination as displayed in Figure 7.

Figure 7: iPhone with Sample Trip Itinerary

With these unique features, our design supplies components missing from current web 2.0 sites for tourists. This design forms a starting point for the eventual implementation of a fully functional website, an initiative led by Dr. Donato Concato, Dirigente APT, Provincia di Venezia. Our website design is the ultimate tourist guide; it customizes the tourist experience based on the personal preferences of each individual user.

Conclusion

Our all-inclusive website, Divertimi, covers every aspect of the trip planning process through its innovative and unique components. These components transform Divertimi from a website used for searching to a website that facilitates the discovery of unexpected, but personalized results. The Photorganizer makes the profiling process less tedious by providing the user with entertainment through classification of photos. Through this profiling component, Divertimi learns the unique behaviors and preferences of each user to recommend with accuracy. Our design not only recommends based on the user’s personal interests, but also allows the user to receive trusted recommendations from family and friends. Our social networking component also provides a specialized group planner to take into consideration the many tourists who travel with family and friends. In addition to these components, our design also features multimedia narratives that provide an invaluable resource for the trip planning process and the trip itself. These narratives are readily available to the user at any time during the trip when downloaded to a mobile device. By providing these core innovations and enhancements through the design of our website, our work has supplied Dr. Donato Concato with the strong foundation needed for the grant proposal of a web 2.0 site for tourists. Our design is a significant improvement on existing travel websites and provides tourists with a customized, unique, and enriching travel experience.

Project Deliverables

Our main deliverable was a powerpoint presentation of the prototype web 2.0 site for tourists. The presentation takes the audience through the actual use of the website and highlights all of the unique features and components of the site. We have created a final report and poster which can be viewed at http://www.veniceprojectcenter.org/B08/ve08-visit/CD/ along with supplementary videos created throughout the course of our project.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr. Donato Concato, Dirigente APT, Provincia di Venezia, for allowing our group to provide the foundation for his grant proposal of a web 2.0 site for tourists. Collaboration with Dr. Concato provided our group with useful advice and guidance in the development of the website design.

We would also like to thank Professor Michele Tamma, Professor of Economics at the University Ca’Foscari Venezia, and his Ph.D. student Anna Moretti for offering useful input on the usability and feasibility of our website design.

We would like to thank Bruno Nogara and Laura Sabbadin, experienced tour guides, for offering the inside scoop on the tourists of Venice as well as providing our group with specialized tours and narratives for our website design.

We would like to acknowledge Laura Hanlan, the inter-library loan resource specialist at WPI, for sending us invaluable resources that contributed significantly to our project.

Last, but certainly not least we would like to thank our project advisors, Professor Carrera and Professor Davis for offering support and guidance through the past 14 weeks of the IQP process. Without their constant input and advice, we would not have been able to complete a successful project.

A special thanks to our families for providing guidance and support even from across the world. Without their comforting phone calls, numerous emails, and web cam videos, we would not have made it through to the end of this project.

Primary Resources

There were two resources that were particularly useful for the design and creation of our web 2.0 site. These two documents were useful in finding an effective profiling system and the mechanics behind the system.