An Agent-Mediated Tendering Mechanism for Intelligent Hotel Reservation

The tourism industry has been radically transformed by Internet-related technologies. Today, online travel agencies (OTAs) have replaced traditional travel agencies offering customers online booking services related to their travels. However, the current OTAs model is limited to the "search, compare, and book" business process. For a traveler, it can be time consuming and labor intensive to look for a suitable choice across a large number of hotels online. On the other hand, hotel service providers cannot adaptively adjust their marketing strategies in real time according to potential customers' requirements. There is a lack of an effective communication mechanism to automatically matching requirements and interests between customers and service providers. In this paper, we propose to improve the current OTAs model with an agent-mediated tendering mechanism. We elicit the requirements of both hotel customers and service providers with the agent oriented modeling language i*. Based on such functional and non-functional requirement analysis, an agent-based tendering system is built to help hotel service provider to proactively adapt their room price and help traveler to automatically suggest suitable hotel choices. We find that such agent-mediated tendering mechanism can pareto-improve the OTAs model in terms of the cost and benefit of both the customer and the service provider.