Socially Enhanced Travel Booking: A Case Study

The ability to obtain user data in an unobtrusive way is instrumental to the success of recommendations based on collaborative data. In a travel booking scenario, where data about the current user was sparse, a solution based on displaying booking statistics was proposed. A prototype system was built in a joint project with the international transport and travel service company Stena Line. A qualitative user evaluation provided support for two hypotheses: 1) that displaying statistics of other travellers’ booking choices would support users in the booking process, and 2) that users would form their own recommendations if presented with background information.