FairPlay+: A Certified-Fair Hotel Room Recommendations Framework

Abstract

Over the past decade, overtourism has emerged as a major threat to the quality of life in popular tourist destinations. Overtourism poses multiple challenges to the local communities. Among others, overpricing and profiteering harm local societies and economies deeply. On the other hand, uncontrolled overpricing makes such popular destinations inaccessible to a large portion of the populace, undermining the UN-sanctioned right to tourism. In this work, we put forward FairPlay+, a framework for hotel room recommendations with certified-fair prices. Our framework (a) can incorporate any mechanism that guarantees fair hotel room prices, according to any corresponding definition of fairness;(b) ascertains that the providers receive fair exposition by the system; and (c) importantly, guarantees that the providers are appropriately incentivised to accept the fair price proposed by the mechanism for their rooms instead of setting that price themselves. Specifically, we prove that providers are in expectation (weakly) better-off to accept the pricing policy proposed by the platform. Moreover, our simulation experiments demonstrate that (a) the platform-proposed fair policy is indeed the most profitable choice for the providers; while (b) providers adhering to the FairPlay+ proposed policy can better serve customer demand, considering customers of various budgets: in particular, FairPlay+ allows low-budget visitors to find accommodation that would be inaccessible to them without the use of fair pricing policies.