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H. Berger, M. Denk, M. Dittenbach, W. Merkl, A. Pesenhofer:
"Quo Vadis Homo Turisticus? Towards a Picture-Based Tourist Profiler";
Talk: ENTER Conference 2007, Ljubljana, Slovenia; 02-2007; in: "Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism", M. Sigala (ed.); (2007), ISBN: 978-3-211-69564-7; 87 - 96.

The World Wide Web has become an important source of information for tourists planning
their vacation. So, destination recommendation systems supporting users in their decision
making process by suggesting suitable holiday destinations or packages based on user profiles
are a vivid area of research. Considering the complex and often tedious task to obtain such
profiles we are exploring a new direction to manufacture user profiles. Having in mind that a
picture paints a thousand words we conducted an online survey that allows investigating the
relationship between tourism-related photographs and tourist types. In a nutshell, our findings
show a significant relationship between different tourist types and the preference for particular
visual impressions conveyed by photographs. Thus, tourist types can be determined by
representative photos without necessarily requesting users to provide additional information.

e-tourism, user profile, recommender system