Point-of-Interest Recommender Systems: Nudging towards Sustainable Tourism

With the increasing attention to environmental sustainability, matching user preferences and green behavior has become a must in several domains, including tourism. However, changing people's traveling habits is hard and requires a relevant motivation effort. This short paper investigates the exploitation of digital nudges to promote sustainable tourism in personalized mobile guides for natural and cultural heritage exploration. The ultimate goal is to enhance point-of-interest recommender systems with the capability to drive users toward the selection of itineraries that they like and that can be managed by exploiting green means of transportation. For this purpose, we propose to integrate the recommendation of Points of Interest that satisfy the user's interests with an explicit presentation of the environmental impact of traveling to such places, using digital nudges to drive the user toward the selection of sustainable tour management solutions.