An extended COPRAS model for multi-criteria decision-making problems and its application in web-based hotel evaluation and selection

Facilitation of suitable accommodation for different travellers is the prime concern of travel agencies. Travel agencies must keep themselves competitive and sustain a good pace of growth to continue raising profits by attracting and retaining as many tourists as possible through meeting their various prospective needs. To achieve this, the agencies must prepare well-organised data for hotels and destinations from a quality control perspective. Initially, the hotels are ranked and evaluated according to performance across several criteria from the tourists' viewpoint. The relative importance of each criterion is mainly subjective and depends on the assessor's judgement. Additionally, hotels' rankings vary across different websites, resulting in inconsistencies. To handle such inconsistencies and subjectivity, this paper presents a collective decision-making evaluation framework by integrating a weighted interval rough number (WIRN) method and a WIRN-based complex proportional assessment (COPRAS) model to evaluate and rank hotels. An empirical example and a real-world case study from the Indian tourism industry are presented to validate the applicability of the proposed framework. Finally, a comparison and sensitivity analysis are performed to examine the validity and robustness of the proposed model.