Assessing Travel Websites Based on Service Quality Attributes Under Intuitionistic Environment

Assessing Travel Websites Based on Service Quality Attributes Under Intuitionistic Environment

Abhishek Tandon, Himanshu Sharma, Anu Gupta Aggarwal
Copyright: © 2019 |Pages: 10
DOI: 10.4018/IJKBO.2019010106
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Abstract

Digitalization has increased the importance of online marketing as compared to its traditional counterpart. Over the years, the number of customers using online portals for booking tickets and hotel rooms via online travel agencies (OTAs) has shown an increasing trend. This may be due to the discounts and add-on services provided by OTA retailers. Quality of the website attracts customers to make a visit and henceforth a purchase. Since the satisfaction of online customers impacts the success of a website, a model is proposed to rank OTA websites on the basis of factors that affect website quality. The website quality criteria considered are trust, ease of use, tangibility, ease of booking, navigation, customization, system availability, responsiveness, and interactivity of ewom (electronic word-of-mouth) systems. The model combines the multi criteria group decision making (MCGDM) techniques of intuitionistic fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (IFAHP) and intuitionistic fuzzy preference ranking order method for evaluation enrichment (IFPROMETHEE). A case study is provided to validate the model. The results of the case study show the higher ranking given to the OTA website with most efficient service quality attributes.
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1. Introduction

Technological advancements have led to greater interaction between the online customers and the marketers. The service sector has increased the usage of online platforms over the years. The increase in sales of hospitality sector especially the online travel is expected to cross 817.5 billion US dollars by 2020 (Statista, 2017). With the noticeable increase in online travel segment, the online marketing speculators are keenly focused on this industry (Sambhanthan & Good, 2014). OTA provides a single interface for the customers to compare prices and buy trips online (Ku & Fan, 2009). This is enhanced by enabling the customers to purchase air plane tickets, book hotel rooms, and hire cars through various vendors but using single site and single transaction. Previous researchers have proved a positive correlation between pleasant online shopping experience and the quality of site (Wang, Law, Guillet, Hung, & Fong, 2015). Website quality is the perceived effectiveness of the online shopping site as per the customers browsing the website. The information quality, system quality, and service quality combine together to form a multidimensional construct the website service quality. Website service quality is an extension of the traditional service quality introduced by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1988) over the online mode (Zeithaml, Parasuraman, & Malhotra, 2002).

The effectiveness of a website can be measured by the satisfaction level experienced by online users during their browsing sessions. Many extant researches have vocalized the dimensions that impact website quality, which is a quintessential for online customer satisfaction (Yoo, Kim, & Sanders, 2015). Earlier studies in the hospitality sector were mainly centered about hotel industry (Ali, 2016; Li, Peng, Jiang, & Law, 2017). Not much work has evaluated and measured the success of online travel websites. This paper provides an intuitionistic multi criteria decision making approach to rank online travel agency (OTA) websites on the basis of constructs measuring website quality success. The dimensions considered for evaluation purposes are trust, tangibility, customization, ease of ordering, navigation, system availability, ease of use, responsiveness, and interactivity of ewom (electronic word-of-mouth) systems.

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