Recommender systems in mobile tourism have attracted considerable interest during the past decade.
However, most existing recommender systems in mobile tourism fail to exploit information, evaluations
or ratings provided by other tourists of similar interests. In this research, we propose to facilitate attrac-
tion recommendation task by exploring other tourists’ ratings on their visited attractions. The proposed
approach employs mobile peer-to-peer communications for exchanging ratings via their mobile devices.
A cost-effective travel recommender system—iTravel—thus is developed to provide tourists with on-tour
attraction recommendation. We propose three data exchange methods that allow users to effectively
exchange their ratings toward visited attractions. Simulated experiments are performed to evaluate the
proposed data exchange methods and a user study is conducted to validate the usability of the proposed
iTravel system.