Let’s Get Social in e-Tourism: The “itchy feet” Way

In this paper we outline an e-Tourism environment that takes a community-driven approach to foster a lively society of travellers who exchange travel experiences, recommend tourism destinations or just listen to catch some interesting gossip. Business transactions such as booking a trip or getting assistance from travel advisors or community members are constituent parts of this environment. All this happens in an integrated, game-like e-Business application where each customer is impersonated as an avatar. We present “itchy feet”, a prototype implementing this 3D e-Tourism environment to showcase first visual impressions. This new environment is a perfect research playground for examining heterogeneous societies comprising humans and software agents, and their relationship in e-Tourism.