A City Guide Agent Creating and Adapting Individual Sightseeing Tours Based on Field Trial Results

Abstract: Tourists deciding to explore a destination spontaneously on their own often end up following the majority to the crowded locations. Today’s agent technology provides the opportunity for intelligent guides taking care of the whole tour organisation and execution in time and thus providing individual experiences. This is the main objective of the Dynamic Tour Guide (DTG)- a mobile agent that selects attractions, plans individual tours, provides navigational guidance and offers location based interpretation. Over all it consistently adapts the tour to a tourist’s specific behaviour in order to provide any possible support via a mobile device. A field trial served to clarify fundamental questions to achieve personality in mobile context: Is it possible to seed interest profiles that allow the accurate prediction of actual rankings of sights? Are these profiles sufficiently diverse to base personalised tours on individual interests? Do personal tours really affect spatial behaviour of tourists? Analyzing the captured interest profiles gives an insight into their actual diversity, discusses their necessity and helps simulating an improved distribution of tourists at a destination