RecomARhotel

Brief Description of the project:

Tourism in Greece is a key element of the country’s economic activity and one of its most important sectors. However, over time, the need to promote digital applications in tourism has been recognized by all competent bodies, as the systematic exploitation and enhancement of technological innovation in ICT is a strategic choice and a bet for increasing competitiveness and enhancing the quality of Greek tourism services. The era of the ‘digital’ traveller has already begun. In this environment, hoteliers are called upon to respond to new digital needs, often even to anticipate them.

Sustainable development in tourism requires the integration of all the possibilities offered by technology, such as artificial intelligence, digital platforms, big data and virtual reality. There are now several successful examples of hotels differentiating themselves by implementing massive personalisation to surprise and delight their guests. It is important to give the customer the opportunity to experience unique experiences. It is now imperative that hotels and hoteliers think like technology companies and necessarily work with specialist technology partners. In the new era, the hospitality entrepreneur cannot just be a hotelier, but at the same time must be a story teller. Moreover, the use of technological applications is sought to manage and measure the sustainable development of tourist destinations in order to improve productivity and quality of tourism services.

For this reason, various Recommendation Systems (RS) have been proposed as a practical means to overcome the problem of information overload. Recommendation systems are information systems that use techniques for analysing user preferences – ratings combined with information on products or services, are based on algorithms-models for generating recommendations, calculate recommendations in real time and present personalised recommendations to each client user. In addition, delightful experience design systems using virtual reality (VR) in tourism have also emerged that change the way people perceive the digital world, enabling hotels to transform the way they host, for example by showing people a place before they visit it, so they know what to expect. In augmented reality, images generated by a computer are projected onto images of the real world. As Virtual Reality (VR) technologies evolve, they offer more potential applications in the tourism industry.

The aim of the project is the creation of recommendation systems – virtually imprinted – by the hotels that will enable their users – customers to choose between the proposed tourism products/services having full knowledge of their characteristics, as manifested in conditions that simulate the physical reality. The aim is also to create an integrated digital ecosystem for the promotion and promotion of the hotel product in which all the information that the visitor is looking for about the hotel destination will be concentrated in a single point and enriched with new virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) and video projection technologies. The final objective of the project is to create an innovative recommendation system tailored to the needs of the hotel’s prospective customers with some Augmented Reality (AR) applications that constitute an innovation in tourism.