SportsTraveler76
This project aims to provide innovative services that enable travelers to book and actively participate in “soft sport tourism” activities, which is not currently addressed by other platforms and websites. It aims to be the first worldwide web platform offering adaptive and personalized recommendation services for online booking of full packages by customers based on their preferences and sporting interests. On the business side, the project aims to improve and optimize the existing ST76 web platform by developing new software services and integrating with third-party travel management services. The sports travelers, sport event organizers and tourism and sport industry stakeholders will be the prime sources of research surveys, sports data collection and analysis activities. Also, external Web APIs or web elements offered by third-parties for flight tickets, hotels and car rental services will be efficiently integrated and managed dynamically, to offer the first platform of its kind internationally that provides the full set of services for “soft sport tourism”. On the research side, the project aims at identifying research works and performing a survey on recommender systems (RS) and context-aware recommender systems (CARS) for tourism. In specific, personalization methods are used to generate a user recommendation according to the user preferences and interests. Thus, the recommender system has an objective to filter unwanted information and to provide specific results for a specific user. The target of the survey is to study existing recommendation algorithms and methods applied in tourism. Finally, based on the data analysis in relation to “soft sport tourism” activities and the research survey a new CARS algorithm and system will be defined and implemented. This CARS algorithm/system will then be integrated and tested with the final ST76 web platform.
Publications:
Achilleas Achilleos, Michalis Makrominas, Christos Markides, Rafael Alexandrou, Andreas Konstantinidis, Elena Papacosta, Panos Constantinides, Effie Zikouli and Leondios Tselepos, "Promoting active sports tourism through technology and evaluating its economic impact: experiences from Cyprus", Taylor & Francis, Journal of Sport & Tourism, (2021), CiteScore: 3.2.
Achilleas Achilleos, Andreas Konstantinidis, Rafael Alexandrou, Christos Markides, Effie Zikouli, George Papadopoulos, "A Web Platform and a Context Aware Recommender System for Active Sport Events", 21st International Conference on Innovations for Community Services, I4CS 2021, May 26 - 28, Bamberg, Germany, 2021.
Achilleas Achilleos, Christos Markides, Michalis Makrominas, Andreas Konstantinides, Rafael Alexandrou, Effie Zikouli, Elena Papacosta, Panos Constantinides and Leondios Tselepos, "Evaluating the Economic Impact of Active Sports Tourism Events: Lessons Learned from Cyprus", 7th International Conference of the International Association of Cultural and Digital Tourism (IACuDiT 2020), Springer Proceedings, Culture and Tourism in a Smart, Globalized and Sustainable World, Hydra, 2-4 September.
People:
Achilleas Achilleos, BSc, MSc, PhD - Principal Investigator
Andreas Konstantinidis, PhD - Researcher
Michalis Hadjidemetriou - Developer