As a concept, artificial intelligence has technically existed since the 1950s. Specifically, the term was first coined in a conference at Dartmouth College in 1956, and has since come to be known by the more simplified initialism of AI. It may have far future implications, but artificial intelligence is used now in more aspects of our lives than we are likely aware of - from the everyday fraud detection and shopping promotions, to more controversial systems such as facial recognition. While we're still longing for Marty McFly's self tying shoes and hover-board to become part of the norm, AI is one aspect of the old sci-fi world that really has come true. Back when we were dreaming of driverless cars and superhuman cyborg law enforcers, we couldn't really comprehend how the 21st Century would shape out.

In this article, we present a last-minute travel application as part of a complete virtual travel agency. Each year, a significant amount of tour packages are sold as last minute tours in Germany. It is impossible for a travel agent to keep track of all the offered tour packages. Electronic-commerce applications might present the best possible tour package for a specific customer request. Traditional database-driven applications, as used by most of the tour operators, are not sufficient enough to implement a sales process with consultation on the World Wide Web. The last-minute travel application presented here uses case-based reasoning to bridge this gap and simulate the sales assistance of a human travel agent. A case retrieval net, as an internal data structure, proved to be efficient in handling the large amount of data. Important for the acceptance by customers is also the integration into the virtual travel agency and the interconnections to other parts of this system, such as background information or the online car rental application.