AI Chatbot for Tourist Recommendations: A Case Study in the City of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Chatbots have gained increasing importance in today research with a lot of available applications. They are flexible and can be applied in many application domains.  In tourism, Chatbots can recommend sights, hotels, activities, or even full travel plans. Usually, users are required to visit plenty of websites and install different Apps into their mobile phones in order to navigate the city and planning for the trip which is inconvenient and time-consuming. To address this issue, this paper proposes “Smart Guidance”, an AI text-based chatbot that is developed as a mobile application. It simulates a chat with users in a natural language, it also provides a two-way interaction and it is a single point of contact for all user communications. We provide a use case in the city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Jeddah is the second largest city in Saudi Arabia and tourists have various choices when it comes to moving around the city. The final evaluation of the chatbot showed that the bot could understand meanings and users’ requests. Moreover, users found that the interaction is effective, and the responses are provided immediately. Users were satisfied and like the idea that they could express their needs in their natural language. Furthermore, users enjoyed the interaction and felt engaged.