Context-Aware Conversational AI for Intelligent Travel Planning and Smart Tourism

Abstract: The increasing use of digital technologies in tourism has created a demand for intelligent travel assistance systems that provide personalised recommendations, contextual information, and convenient trip planning. This paper presents an AI-powered multilingual travel guide designed to support tourism across Karnataka, India. The proposed system integrates natural language processing, machine-learning-based intent recognition, tourism information retrieval, destination recommendation, and budget-aware itinerary generation within a web-based platform. Developed using Python Flask, the application supports information about 62 tourist destinations and enables users to interact in English, Kannada, and Hindi. Its conversational engine combines Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF)- based intent classification, keyword rules, context-aware dialogue processing, and hybrid information retrieval to generate relevant travel responses. A content-based recommendation component considers traveller interests, destination characteristics, ratings, popularity, geographical proximity, seasonality, and saved places. The itinerary planner generates day-wise travel schedules, estimates expenses, organises destinations geographically, and supports planning according to budget constraints. Voice interaction, destination exploration, user accounts, saved destinations, and itinerary export further extend the platform's functionality. The system uses SQLite by default and supports optional integration with a large language model for response generation. This paper presents the system architecture, implementation methodology, major functional modules, and approach to functional evaluation. The work demonstrates an integrated software architecture for multilingual, AI-assisted regional tourism and identifies opportunities for further evaluation and real-time tourism information integration.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Smart Tourism, Conversational AI, Multilingual Chatbot, Information Retrieval, Recommendation Systems, Intelligent Trip Planning.