2.4. Our Study—Justification and Approach
’ emotions
While the technical and user experience value of a recommender system such as Zoey have been well documented in previous research, the application of this technology to overtourism issues has not been studied. If information interventions from recommender systems or more conventional sources actually causes tourists to travel elsewhere, it is likely to affect their emotional and evaluated experiences, but this assumption remains untested. Tourists’ emotions drive their evaluations, however, which in turn drive important destination outcomes such as behavioral intentions [In this project we utilized Travel with Zoey as a conversational recommender system to deliver destination information to a group of visitors to Overijssel, a province in the east of The Netherlands. We compared its effectiveness to that of a default, passive map-based mobile application. Furthermore, we investigated the effectiveness of prioritizing attractions based on the policy of the DMO to direct visitors to certain places while reducing the pressure on others. We were guided by the following question:Does a conversational recommender system, as compared to passive map-based mobile applications, spatially direct tourists to less-visited areas, and how are their vacation experiences and evaluations changed as a result?More specifically, we address the following sub-questions in our study:To what extent does tourists receiving different attraction information (attractions in heavily-visited vs. less-visited areas), from different sources (conversational vs. passive),differ in their spatial movements?visit different types of attractions?experience different self-reported emotions day-to-day?visit different proportions of urban and rural destinations?evaluate their experiences differently?