Design of information system architecture for the recommendation of tourist sites in the city of Manta, Ecuador through a Chatbot

The Evolution of Chatbots in Tourism: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The majority of the elaborated studies focus on hotel, airline, and travel agency sub-domains (20 studies). Four focus on promoting specific areas or cultural heritage sites (e.g., CBT for promoting the city of Manta in Ecuador [2] and Pompeii's archaeological park in Italy [26]). Finally, one study focuses on medical tourism (i.e., a chatbot identifying medicines available in the visited location compared with those, possibly unavailable, sold in the tourist's origin location).…”

“…Implementing a competitive solution can require considerable financial investments [4] For example, the costs can vary between $30.000 and $150.000 [27]. Moreover, to gather the data needed for the user request, many CBTs make commercial use of services such as Avis, Uber, IBM Watson, and Google Dialogflow, and Google Maps, which also require financial expenses [2].…”

“…CBTs also require a remarkable technical knowledge. For example, modelling user and system dynamics [3], identifying and designing the right architecture [2], modelling and automating processes and testing [3,29], and modelling and implementing data collection, compliance, and organization [2,17,35].…”

“…On the other hand, beyond automation-related features, there is a need for personalization. To do so, several Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based solutions (e.g., chatbots) are getting space in the market [2]. A chatbot is a computer program able to entertain a natural language-based conversation with a human.…”

“…In the last five years, early prototypes were mainly based on simple state machines, offering simple interactions simulating conversations with humans [2,7]. In the tourism sector, the first interactions delegated to a chatbot were used to support the search for tips and information (e.g., opening hours) of local restaurants [17] and customer-care basic support (i.e., 85% of customer care in tourism are today handled by chatbots/AI-based systems [37]).…”