Fuzzy evaluation of hotel websites

Abstract

Prior studies on hotel website performance have primarily concentrated on frequency counting, content analysis or user behavioral approaches. These studies, however, failed to offer any insight that can accurately evaluate hotel website quality based on users' assessment of attribute weights and performance ratings. This research proposes a fuzzy multicriteria analysis model which systematically integrates hotel guests' preferences and fuzzy assessments of website attributes. The fuzzy evaluation of linguistic values by respondents offers a comprehensive approach for handling incomplete and imprecise user preferences to capture the realistic evaluation process. The research output will be a set of overall performance indices representing the cumulative effect of website features, which will offer a benchmark enabling hotels to evaluate their websites' relative performance and ranking based on all relevant weighted attributes. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.