Towards Sustainable Recommendations in Urban Tourism

In the context of urban tourism promotion, I am exploring how recommender systems (RSs) can personalise information [24] in order to shift tourists behaviour from typically popularity-biased towards more niche and urban-friendly.This problem has a great importance in sustainability online promotion campaigns.Urban destination managers strive to prevent overcrowding at popular points of interest (POIs) [7,18,21], by attracting visitors to less popular POIs, while still providing personalised access to information.It is assumed, that this approach will maintain a healthy distribution of tourists in a city; both reducing tourist congestion, and, considering each POI as a local business, maintaining the longterm economic viability in a city.This problem has already received some attention in the literature, targeting major European touristic cities [29].However, many complex issues still need to be resolved for a comprehensive solution.In this extended abstract, I highlight open research problems, and identify key research questions (RQs) that are crucial for advancing sustainable tourism development leveraging RSs.Although I focus on urban tourism, my RQs and methods can be applied to various recommendation areas because they are general. RELATED WORKThis section introduces concepts and topics related to RSs design that are relevant to my research.It also points out limitations in the state-of-the-art research that will be addressed in my work.For each topic, I identify key articles that frame my work.