In this project we develop an e-Tourism environment that takes a community-driven approach to foster a lively society of
travelers. It enables them to exchange travel experiences, recommend tourism destinations or just catch some interesting gossip.
Moreover, business transactions such as booking a trip or getting assistance from
professional travel agents are a constituent part of this environment.
All these interactions happen in an integrated, game-like, 3D Virtual
World where each tourist is impersonated as an avatar. A retrospection on the specification, design and implementation of this
e-Tourism environment is given and the status quo is presented. It is describe how
Electronic Institutions, a framework developed and employed in
the area of Multi-Agent Systems, are applied to the tourism domain. Furthermore, we
present an approach to connect a 3D Virtual World with Electronic
Institutions. Our goal is to provide a test bed for assessing the
acceptance of virtual environments, as a medium to overcome the
non-tangible nature of tourism products.