Matching traveller preferences to destination and product characteristics: It’s all a matter of semantics

The purchase of a very expensive, complex product or service such as an extended international holiday requires a great deal of information and reliable expert advice. The risks involved in such a purchase are substantial.For this reason it is expected that travellers will continue to use retail travel agents to complete their travel arrangements provide they can continue to add value (O’Brien, 1998; AFTA, 1994; Bloch & Segev, 1996; Poon, 1993).This paper discusses the implementation of systems that provide fast, easy access to reliable product and destinational information that closely matches the traveller’s desired experience. An architecture for a World Wide Web based semantic matching system using formal ontologies is proposed.