| dc.description.abstract | ABSTRACT
Nowadays, the tourism industry and social network have grown rapidly, all kinds
of travel websites have been set up. To get the users′ attention, the tourism websites
should provide customized and accurate travel recommendations for their users and
help them make better travel decisions. However, previous recommendations required
the user’s browsing history records to generate recommended travel options. But this
mechanism is not suit able for the tourism industry, because travel information is
continuously updating.
In addition, when people make travel decisions they will seek information
through ＂word of mouth＂. This is the key point to why previous recommendation
methods are not useful now. Therefore, this study uses friendships degree - strong
and weak ties as recommendation elements, and compares the degree of friendships
on influencing the end user’s on travel decisions. Granovetter (1983) pointed out,
＂The weak ties play a salient job for information derives＂. So this study is based on
his argument, and further explores whether the weak ties play an important role in
travel decisions.
This study’s results showed that when users plan travel destinations they will be
affected by their friend’s recommendations. In addition, this study proves that the
weak ties have more influence on the end user’s travel decision than strong ties. In
other words, when users search for travel information, they tend to take advice from
acquaintances into consideration, because their information does not overlap with the
end user. Hence, friends in weak ties have more influential effect the user’s travel
choices. So, friendships factor should be considered within the travel recommendation
system. Beside, friends in weak ties should be taken into higher consideration!
Keywords: Weak ties, Social network, Word of mouth, Recommendation | en_US |