Using FQFD to analyze island accommodation management in fuzzy linguistic preferences

Tourists’ service management has become a strategic issue for hospitality industry in tourism management field. By improving accommodation performances, hospitality firms increase customer satisfaction and gain market shares. Nonetheless, most previously proposed or introduced research paradigms have focused on tourists without equally emphasizing the intra-organizational service quality and delivery processes. The aim of this paper is to propose an approach for both external and internal service management issue and service innovations based on the framework of Fuzzy Quality Function Deployment (FQFD), a methodology that has been successfully adopted in new service development. Specifically, the paper addresses the issue of how to deploy the House of Quality (HoQ) to improve accommodation service innovation processes and tourist satisfaction effectively and efficiently. Fuzzy logic is a methodology to deal with the ill-defined nature of the tourist linguistic judgments required in the proposed HoQ. The tourism case in island accommodation demonstrates the implementation of the proposed FQFD. The effective and appropriate accommodation directions for service innovation designs acquired by applying the proposed FQFD, thus, enable hotels managers to achieve a competitive advantage.