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

This work presents a two‐stage linguistic multicriteria decision‐making model to integrate the hotel guests' opinions included in several Web sites, and incorporates it into an opinion aggregation architecture to integrate heterogeneous data (natural language included) from various tourism Web sites.

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). © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.