Using fuzzy number for measuring quality of service in the hotel industry

This paper presents a fuzzy multi-attribute decision-making approach for evaluating dynamically the service quality of three hotels of an important corporation in Gran Canaria island via surveys. Service quality is a composite of various attributes, among them many attributes are intangible and difficult to measure. Fuzzy numbers (FN) are based on triangular fuzzy numbers and fuzzy set theory as a new method to overcome some linguistic problems. In other words, fuzzy numbers try to resolve the ambiguity of concepts that are associated with human beings' subjective judgments vaguely measured with linguistic terms. Based on the concept of the degree of optimality, we develop through TOPSIS an overall service performance index for each pair hotel-date of survey. This index will help hotel managers to understand their relative ranking position, and provide an adequate alternative to performance evaluation of hotel services which usually involve subjective judgments of qualitative attributes. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.