Field Study on Methods for Elicitation of Preferences using a Mobile Digital Assistant for a Dynamic tour Guide1

Knowing tourists’ individual preferences provides the possibility to offer personalized tours. The challenge is to capture these preferences using a mobile device. During a field study in Görlitz three methods for elicitation were evaluated by computing the correlation between the tourists’ and the algorithms’ rankings. The results served to clarify fundamental questions en route to develop a personal tour guide. 1) Is it possible to seed interest profiles in the mobile context with all its distractions that allow the accurate prediction of actual rankings of sights? 2) Are the interest profiles sufficiently diverse to base personalized tours on individual interest profiles instead of interest prototypes? 3) How do personalized tours affect the spatial behavior of tourists, do they really visit different attractions than before? Analyzing the interest profiles gives an insight into their actual diversity, discusses their necessity and helps simulating an improved distribution of tourists at a destination.