Abstract
Travel recommendation agents have been a helpful tool for travelers in their decision-making for destination choices. It has been shown that sparsity can significantly impact on the accuracy of recommendation agents. The COVID-19 outbreak has affected the tourism and hospitality industry of almost all countries in the world. Tourists who have planned to travel are canceling or postponing trips due to this pandemic. Accordingly, this will impact the rate of travelers' online reviews on tourism products. Hence, the lack of data, in terms of ratings and textual reviews on hotels, will be a major issue for travel recommendation agents during the COVID-19 outbreak in the context of tourism and hospitality. This will be a new challenge for the researchers in the development of travel recommendation agents. Machine learning has been found to be effective in dealing with the data sparsity in recommendation agents. Therefore, developing new algorithms would be helpful to overcome the sparsity issue in travel recommendation agents. This research provides a new method through neurofuzzy, dimensionality reduction, and clustering techniques and evaluates it on the TripAdvisor dataset to see its effectiveness in solving the sparsity issue. The results showed that the method which used the fuzzy logic technique with the aid of clustering, dimensionality reduction, and fuzzy logic is more efficient in addressing the sparsity problem and presenting more accurate results. The results of the method evaluation are presented and discussed, and several suggestions are provided for future studies.