Point of Interest Recommendation: Pitfalls and Viable Solutions

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Main Authors: Bellogín, Alejandro, Dietz, Linus W., Ricci, Francesco, Sánchez, Pablo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Bellogín, Alejandro
Dietz, Linus W.
Ricci, Francesco
Sánchez, Pablo
author_facet Bellogín, Alejandro
Dietz, Linus W.
Ricci, Francesco
Sánchez, Pablo
contents Point of interest (POI) recommendation can play a pivotal role in enriching tourists' experiences by suggesting context-dependent and preference-matching locations and activities, such as restaurants, landmarks, itineraries, and cultural attractions. Unlike some more common recommendation domains (e.g., music and video), POI recommendation is inherently high-stakes: users invest significant time, money, and effort to search, choose, and consume these suggested POIs. Despite the numerous research works in the area, several fundamental issues remain unresolved, hindering the real-world applicability of the proposed approaches. In this paper, we discuss the current status of the POI recommendation problem and the main challenges we have identified. The first contribution of this paper is a critical assessment of the current state of POI recommendation research and the identification of key shortcomings across three main dimensions: datasets, algorithms, and evaluation methodologies. We highlight persistent issues such as the lack of standardized benchmark datasets, flawed assumptions in the problem definition and model design, and inadequate treatment of biases in the user behavior and system performance. The second contribution is a structured research agenda that, starting from the identified issues, introduces important directions for future work related to multistakeholder design, context awareness, data collection, trustworthiness, novel interactions, and real-world evaluation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_13725
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Point of Interest Recommendation: Pitfalls and Viable Solutions
Bellogín, Alejandro
Dietz, Linus W.
Ricci, Francesco
Sánchez, Pablo
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Point of interest (POI) recommendation can play a pivotal role in enriching tourists' experiences by suggesting context-dependent and preference-matching locations and activities, such as restaurants, landmarks, itineraries, and cultural attractions. Unlike some more common recommendation domains (e.g., music and video), POI recommendation is inherently high-stakes: users invest significant time, money, and effort to search, choose, and consume these suggested POIs. Despite the numerous research works in the area, several fundamental issues remain unresolved, hindering the real-world applicability of the proposed approaches. In this paper, we discuss the current status of the POI recommendation problem and the main challenges we have identified. The first contribution of this paper is a critical assessment of the current state of POI recommendation research and the identification of key shortcomings across three main dimensions: datasets, algorithms, and evaluation methodologies. We highlight persistent issues such as the lack of standardized benchmark datasets, flawed assumptions in the problem definition and model design, and inadequate treatment of biases in the user behavior and system performance. The second contribution is a structured research agenda that, starting from the identified issues, introduces important directions for future work related to multistakeholder design, context awareness, data collection, trustworthiness, novel interactions, and real-world evaluation.
title Point of Interest Recommendation: Pitfalls and Viable Solutions
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13725