An Agent-Based RAG Architecture for Intelligent Tourism Assistance: The Valencia Case Study

The contemporary digital landscape overwhelms visitors with fragmented and dynamic information, complicating travel planning and often leading to decision paralysis. This paper presents a real-world case study on the design and deployment of an intelligent tourism assistant for Valencia, Spain, built upon a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture. To address the complexity of integrating static attraction data, live events, and geospatial context, we implemented a multi-agent system orchestrated via the ReAct (Reason + Act) paradigm, comprising specialized Retrieval, Events, and Geospatial Agents. Powered by a large language model, the system unifies heterogeneous data sources—including official tourism repositories and OpenStreetMap—within a single conversational interface. Our contribution centers on practical insights and engineering lessons from developing RAG in an operational urban tourism environment. We outline data preprocessing strategies, such as coreference resolution, to improve contextual consistency and reduce hallucinations. System performance is evaluated using Retrieval Augmented Generation Assessment (RAGAS) metrics, yielding quantitative results that assess both retrieval efficiency and generation quality, with the Mistral Small 3.1 model achieving an Answer Relevancy score of 0.897. Overall, this work highlights both the challenges and advantages of using agent-based RAG to manage urban-scale information complexity, providing guidance for developers aiming to build trustworthy, context-aware AI systems for smart destination management.