A linguistic multicriteria decision-making model applied to hotel service quality evaluation from web data sources

Abstract

Currently, there are a large number of hotel Web sites that develop their own seals of quality based on customer feedback. As a result, a hotel can be classified differently by various Web sites at the same time, creating confusion in the consumer perceptions about the quality of a given hotel. Moreover, there are attempts to standardize such service quality evaluation, such as the SERVQUAL instrument, which is a multiple-item scale for measuring service quality with several dimensions. In this context, we present a two-stage linguistic multicriteria decision-making model to integrate the hotel guests' opinions included in several Web sites, with two objectives: on the one hand, obtaining a SERVQUAL scale evaluation value of service quality with the integrated answers of the input opinions; on the other hand, getting a SERVQUAL overall evaluation value of service quality. This model is incorporated into an opinion aggregation architecture to integrate heterogeneous data (natural language included) from various tourism Web sites. As a particular case study, we show an application example using the high-end hotels located in Granada (Spain). Among the successive variants of the latter, the SERVQUAL instrument, 13−17 also called PZB (Parasuraman-Zeithaml-Berry) model, is the most commonly used. 12 SERVQUAL is a multiple-item scale for measuring service quality with five dimensions: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. Several authors have adapted the SERVQUAL instrument to analyze the hotel guests' expectations and perceptions about the service quality of hotels they have visited. 18−21 Some authors (e.g., see Ref. 18) propose a modified SERVQUAL with a basic questionnaire which presents customers a collection of statements (questions) about the five above-mentioned dimensions to ask them if they are agree or disagree on a five-point Likert scale. 22 One method of evaluating hotel quality is the creation of a ranking based on specific criteria and on the assignment of a symbol that certifies a quality category. 1 The symbol and the scale used can vary from one country to another, but the most commonly used are the star and the diamond, with a scale from one to five. In Europe, hotels are usually ranked on a scale from one to five stars, with five stars being the highest rating possible. In Australia and Canada, a five-star scale is also used, sometimes using half star increments. In the United States, hotels are generally ranked on a scale from one to five stars by the Forbes Travel Guide, whereas the American Automobile Association still uses the diamond on the same scale (from one to five). Even countries that had a different scale have modified the structure of their programs over the last few years, making them more uniform. This method is also the more commonly used in tourism Web sites, 2−8 not only to show the overall rating of the hotel, but also to ask the value of the assessed attributes to customers.Regarding the input of this second MCDM process, the first option is to use the ...

Multicriteria Decision Making with Cognitive Limitations: A DS/AHP-Based Approach

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SICTQUAL: A fuzzy linguistic multi-criteria model to assess the quality of service in the ICT sector from the user perspective

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