Background
Contemporary hospitality industry faces difficulties maintaining reputation, which is vital for South East Asia where quality and responsible customers are needed in times of tourism boom and looming danger of pollution. In fact, the reputation concept has been widely used since old times, in many areas. For example, selecting doctors or dentists based on their reputation constructed by other friends, getting married with a person based on family and friends’ suggestions or selection of university to attend based on reputation constructed by past students etc. In an organized world, institutions and certifications replaced classical “word of mouth”-based reputation, whereas doctors, universities, companies are rated or accredited by individual institutions who are expert and recognized by the government and trusted as accrediting institutions.
Yet, the ever increasing power of internet, social media and user generated content, revived centuries old “word of mouth”-based reputation. This, on the other hand brings its own special problems to tackle. Vast amount of data generated turns into a big data problem to be solved and processed, whereas credibility of each user generated data becomes questionable. Users, generate star ratings, comments, stories, blogs, tweets and many different content about the experience they had from the service or goods. These are usually incomplete, varying in quality and credibility and vague in general. This in turn increases the pressure onto the emerging forms of cooperative sustainable tourism that does not have the solid market power of multinational chains.
The project
The proposal aims to create a distributed bidirectional cross-reputation rating and review service for hotel and tourism industry that can be used through multiple countries, in transboundary transactions, for sustainable, cooperative business. ROBTI is thus in pursuit of several specific objectives (SOs):
- Prototyping software algorithms that validate research on cross-reputation rating and review service for the hospitality sector, blockchain and cooperatives.
- Combining together holistically concepts and approaches from disciplines in computer science, urbanism, environmental studies, tourism science, and management.
- Creating an integrated decentralised system for rating and review ready for demonstration and validation in tourism.
- Contributing to the transformation of the hospitality industry into sustainable, inclusive, cooperative model of transboundary business that is rated by trustworthy distributed rating.
The science
ROBTI is aligned with concepts such as sustainability and climate-resilience applied to the tourism industry. It aims to combine other aspects of the project with making the hotel business ‘greener’: reducing the carbon imprint of the hospitality sector onto the environment, hotels shall also build resilience in the local community of the tourism destination to disasters. The research by STMIK and further studies to be done within the project will enable disaster resilient hotels to become major catalysts in managing disasters in the destination area.
ROBTI combines studies and applied research about ICT tools for payments of transboundary transactions and cooperative tourism operations, blockchain technology for distributed review and ranking in the tourism industry and machine learning for trust rate calculation, natural language processing and sentiment analysis. To that extent, the industrial partners (Protel and Setur) and Gebze Techical University have previous research that the project will build upon.
The team
The ROBTI partners are:
Alphan Kimyonok (Coordinator), Meltem Turhan Yöndem, Cenk Yusuf Ustabaş, Müslim Erdal Şekerci, Anıl Özdemir, Mustafa Çelen, İsa Öztürk, Setur, Turkey
Hüseyin Atun, Hakan Özkırım, Tolga Gezginiş, Hasan Soysal, Batuhan, Çoşkun, Protel, Turkey
Assoc. Prof. Mehmet Göktürk, Gebze Techncical University, Turkey
Tri A. Sundara, STMIK Indonesia Padang, Indonesia
Contact:
Cenk Yusuf Ustabaş
