Developing a Conversational Travel Advisor with ADVISOR SUITE

Due to the inherent complexity of building highly-interactive and personalized web applications, the development of a web-based travel advisory system can be a costly and timeconsuming task. We see this as one of the major obstacles to a more widespread adoption of such systems in particular with respect to small and medium-sized companies and e-Tourism platforms. The goal of the ADVISOR SUITE project discussed in this paper is thus to provide an off-the-shelf framework and development environment that allows us to build intelligent and easy-to-maintain advisory applications in a cost-efficient way: The main pillars of the presented system are therefore an integrated graphical modelling-environment, the provision of different domain-independent recommendation algorithms, as well as model-based mechanisms to fully generate functional web applications based on declarative definitions in a central knowledge repository. The paper discusses the core concepts and main functionalities of the system by means of an example of an interactive travel advisor developed for an Austrian spa resort.