Evaluation model for e-tourism product: A hidden Markov model-based algorithm

Abstract

Nowadays, e-tourism is widely pronounced as a kind of web marketing for tourism businesses. Tourist agencies and tourism service providers are able to access their customers directly in a cost-effective way. In this context, due to the high uncertainty of business using the internet, reputation systems play a key role in e-tourism business. After a literature review, and an analysis of the limits of the existing models, we propose a new reputation evaluation model based on optimisation hidden Markov model with particle swarm optimisation (PSOHMM). In order to apply this algorithm into e-tourism services/products evaluation, a number of experiments are presented. These simulation experiments demonstrate the efficiency of the PSOHMM, and the fact that it is more stable than others algorithm to search quickly optimal solutions and to detect any change in the behaviour of the e-tourism providers.