Travel advisor
A travel advisor is a person or a computer-aided system that helps a vacationer when choosing a travel destination and travel offers such as. B. Flights and hotels supported.
Focus of a travel advisor
A travel advisor advises consumers on choosing the right trips for their needs. A trip can e.g. B. consist of a flight, a combination of flight and hotel ( package tour ) or just a hotel. The core competence of a travel advisor is to recommend a suitable region based on the consumer's requirements . The travel consultancy is responsible for selecting only suitable offers from the large number of offers and, ideally, recommending them sorted according to the user's relevance criteria.
Contents of the travel advice
Good travel advice is characterized by the fact that it takes the following aspects into account:
- Selection of the suitable region for the respective season
- Weighing up the advantages and disadvantages as well as finding compromise situations (e.g. short flight time, but going swimming in January)
- Consideration of climate data
- Consideration of regional criteria, such as B. possible activities, outdoor conditions, culture, gastronomy, sports opportunities, shopping and nightlife
- (depending on the scope) also advice on hotels (especially for package tours )
Of course, different priorities are set depending on the application; so for package holidays for vacations the region and z. B. bathing resorts as the main holiday motive in the foreground, while in the case of individual trips, the cultural features and possible activities of a region are more in the foreground. It is precisely this mapping of the different motivations and travel wishes that makes travel advice very complex.
Examples of travel advice
The stationary travel agencies most common example of the travel advice is the clerk at the travel agency.
There are also systems for online travel advice:
Online travel advice from a technical point of view
Numerous online travel portals offer more or less sophisticated search tools, and depending on how far they go, one can speak of advice or not. In the true sense of the word, online advice is used as soon as knowledge-based recommendations are made (that is, the requirements (here: travel requests) are translated into product recommendations). Ideally, travel advice is connected to an internet booking engine in order to check the recommended offers for vacancies and current price offers.
An online travel consultant uses so-called recommender systems (see recommendation service ), a software system with which suitable recommendations (here: travel offers with regional, flight and hotel recommendations) can be made based on user input (here: travel requests).