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

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).(c) 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.