Smart, hybrid and context-aware POI mobile recommender system in tourism in Oman

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to identify the knowledge gap and future opportunities for developing mobile recommender system in tourism sector that lead to comfortable, targeted and attractive tourism. A recommender system improves the traditional classification algorithms and has incorporated many advanced machine learning algorithms. Design/methodology/approach: Design of this application followed a smart, hybrid and context-aware recommender system, which includes various recommender systems. With the recommender system's help, useful management for time and budget is obtained for tourists, since they usually have financial and time constraints for selecting the point of interests (POIs) and so more purposeful trip planned with decreased traffic and air pollution. Findings: The finding of this research showed that the inclusion of additional information about the item, user, circumstances, objects or conditions and the environment could significantly impact recommendation quality and information and communications technology has become one part of the tourism value chain. Practical implications: The application consists of (1) registration: with/without social media accounts, (2) user information: country, gender, age and his/her specific interests, (3) context data: available time, alert, price, spend time, weather, location, transportation. Social implications: The study’s social implications include connecting the app and registration through social media to a more social relationship, with its textual reviews, or user review as user-generated content for increasing accuracy. Originality/value: The originality of this research work lies on introducing a new content- and knowledge-based algorithm for POI recommendations. An “Alert” context emphasizing on safety, supplies and essential infrastructure is considered as a novel context for this application.