Abstract
In the domain of travel and tourism, recommender systems have proven to be valuable tools for supporting potential customers during the decision making process. In contrast to other domains, however, travel recommendation systems must not only include extensive knowledge about catalogued items but also require interactive elicitation of customer requirements. As a consequence, such systems often become highly-interactive and personalized Web applications, whose development can be costly and time-consuming. The authors see these factors as major obstacles to the widespread adoption of this type of recommender system in particular with respect to small and medium-sized companies and e-tourism platforms. The "Vibe virtual spa advisor" presented in this chapter is an example of a recommender system offering such high level interaction. It has been built with the help of AdVisor suite, an off-the-shelf knowledge-based and domain-independent framework for the rapid development of advisory applications. The chapter discusses how development costs can be reduced by using a framework that supports graphical domain modeling, domain-independent recommendation algorithms and semi-automated generation of production quality web applications. The authors also report on practical experiences and give an outlook on future work and opportunities in the domain of travel recommendation.