Destination similarity based on implicit user interest

Cao, Hongliu; Thomas, Eoin

With the digitization of travel industry, it is more and more important to understand users from their online behaviors. However, online travel industry data are more challenging to analyze due to extra sparseness, dispersed user history actions, fast change of user interest and lack of direct or indirect feedbacks. In this work, a new similarity method is proposed to measure the destination similarity in terms of implicit user interest. By comparing the proposed method to several other widely used similarity measures in recommender systems, the proposed method achieves a significant improvement on travel data. Key words: Destination similarity, Travel industry, Recommender System, Implicit user interest