A Fuzzy Multiple Criteria Decision-making Model for Evaluating Travel Websites

In recent years, many travel and tourism businesses have created websites (hereafter, travel websites) to promote their services and products, with the ultimate goal of making the websites easier for their customers to make online reservations. Although online travel is one of the leading and fastest growing applications of e-business, prior studies on assessing the quality of travel websites have largely concentrated on analyzing user behavior, contents of websites, transaction volumes of websites, as well as traffic statistics based on server logs. At a time when academic studies were still insufficient, evaluations of the quality of travel websites using these approaches could achieve a certain degree of success. These approaches, however, do not offer adequate information on what motivates people to visit and to make purchases on travel websites. In other words, these methods do not offer enough insights for customers and practitioners to measure accurately the quality of a website based on user assessments of weighing importance and rating performance. At present, standardized website attributes and guidelines for web design and contents in the context of travel and tourism do not exist. This paper proposes a fuzzy multiple criteria decision-making model to formulate the problem of travel website evaluation. To reflect the intrinsically subjective and imprecise nature of consumers' perceptions of the quality of travel websites, and with respect to multiple website attributes, survey results in Likert-scale will be obtained from user assessments of travel websites, and these results will be processed as fuzzy sets. The expected results will be a set of performance indices for the quality of travel websites, which will offer a benchmark for tourism practitioners to identify the relative performance of their websites and industrial rankings among the leading international websites. The outcomes of this proposed approach, upon its successful implementation and with sufficient empirical tests, are expected to contribute significantly to academic research on tourism and to industrial applications in terms of providing insights for the development of websites.