Last-minute travel application

In this article, we present a last-minute travel application as part of a c omplete VIRTUAL TRAVEL AGENCY. Each year, a significant amount of tour pack ages are sold as last minute tours in Germany. It is impossible for a trave l agent to keep track of all the offered tour packages. Electronic-commerce applications might present the best possible tour package for a specific c ustomer request. Traditional database-driven applications, as wed by most o f the tour operators, are not sufficient enough to implement a sales proces s with consultation on the World Wide Web. The last-minute travel applicati on presented here uses case-based reasoning to bridge this gap and simulate the sales assistance of a human travel agent. A case retrieval net, as an internal data structure, proved to be efficient in handling the large amoun t of data. Important for the acceptance by customers is also the integratio n into the VIRTUAL TRAVEL AGENCY and the interconnections to other parts of this system, such as background information or the online car rental appli cation.