Fuzzy multiple-criteria decision making in the determination of critical criteria for assessing service quality of travel websites

Travel websites provide customers diverse services including travel information and products through the internet. More and more people are used to plan their itineraries and acquire travel information by visiting travel websites. In the face of the strong competition environment, in order to profit by making customers proceed with transactions on the websites, travel websites should pay more attention to the improve the electronic service quality (e-SQ). e-SQ evaluation for travel websites can be treated as a multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem modeled by the given hierarchical structure. As for evaluating e-SQ, since the traditional Likert scales cannot deal with uncertain assessments according to human intuition for the service quality evaluation, the fuzzy number is employed to measure decision-makers’ subjective preference. This paper aims to develop a genetic-algorithm-based method to automatically determine the degrees of importance of respective criteria. Then, critical criteria for evaluating service quality can be easily identified. In the empirical study, four representative travel websites in Taiwan are selected to determine the critical criteria concerned by customers. The findings provide useful information to travel websites for improving e-SQ.