Last Minute Travel Application

Abstract

In this article, we present a last minute travel application as part of a complete virtual travel agency. Each year a significant amount of tour packages is sold as last minute tours in Germany. It is impossible for a travel agent to keep track of all the offered tour packages. E-Commerce applications may help to present the best possible tour package for a specific customer request. Traditional database driven applications, as used by most of the tour operators, are not sufficient enough to implement a sales process with consultation in the WWW. The last minute travel application presented here uses case-based reasoning to bridge this gap and simulate the sales assistance of a human travel agent. A Case Retrieval Net (CRN), as internal data structure, proofed to be efficient to handle the large amount of data. Important for the acceptance by customers is also the integration into the Virtual Travel Agency and the interconnections to other parts of this system, like background information or the online car rental application.