Measuring service quality in the hotel industry: The value of user generated content

This paper presents a fuzzy multi-attribute decision making approach for evaluating the service quality of the hotels of an important tourist destination island: Gran Canaria. We first extract the information provided in www.tripadvisor.com which is becoming one of the most popular websites that assists customers in gathering travel information. The information provided for the hotels located on the island of Gran Canaria using the fixed seven attributes is obtained. Service quality is a composite of these seven attributes, evaluated in a 5 point Likert scale, which are intangible and difficult to measure. For this reason, a method based on Fuzzy Logic is proposed using Fuzzy Numbers (FN). Triangular fuzzy numbers and fuzzy set theory is a very powerful tool to overcome some linguistic problems associated with the Likert scales. Based on the concept of the degree of optimality, we also develop through TOPSIS an overall service performance index for each hotel included in the sample. This index could be used by different stakeholders for understanding and analyzing their relative ranking position and the level of quality provided by the hotels in a specific area. Finally, the ranking is analyzed according to the standard star classification system finding that the hotel industry provides more quality than the extra-hotel industry