The restaurant selection is an important multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. Because many conflicting criteria affect the customers' restaurant selection, there are many alternatives to meet the customers' different and changing needs. The focus of this chapter is to search the criteria that influence the customer decisions to select a restaurant and evaluate the restaurants by utilizing the experiences of the customers. For this purpose, the restaurants located in Istanbul with online reservations that offer first-class dinners are considered as a sample case. The importance of the criteria is defined with the IVIF-CRITIC method, and the restaurants are ranked with the IVIF-CoCoSo method. IVIF sets are used to overcome the uncertainty due to the involvement of human judgment. It can be stated that the proposed methodology can be useful to analyze the human judgments in MCDM problems and develop the weak criteria for the restaurant managers and decide on restaurant choices for the customers.
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“Experiential marketing” was developed by Schmitt (1999). It is one of the marketing strategies that include consumers' emotions and feelings by forming memorable experiences for consumers to become fanatical about the product. Shortly, it depends on consumer experience (Oliha et al., 2021). By applying experiential marketing strategies, businesses can maintain relations with existing customers, have new customers, and form customer loyalty. Loyal customers are very important not only for making a profit, but also for advertising the business (Zena & Hadisumarto, 2012). Today, one of the main reasons for the positive results of experiential marketing strategies is technology (Urdea & Constantin, 2021). One of the businesses that are directly or indirectly affected by the developments in technology is restaurants since the starting point of the restaurants’ marketing activities is customers. Restaurants meet not only the customers’ nutritional needs but also meet their needs such as having a good time, relaxation, and socialization (Albayrak, 2014). Regardless of the reason for this need, individuals will have to research the restaurants that offer the desired service to be able to compare the available alternatives and make a service purchase decision. Services are ‘experiences’ and therefore, their evaluations are difficult before their purchases. If the customers have not experienced the restaurant’s service, they will resort to obtain relevant external information (Pedraja & Yague, 2001). In this manner, the customers get information through printed materials. Also, the restaurants’ websites and social media, recommendations, or experiences are the information sources that are used in restaurant selection (Yılmaz & Gultekin, 2016).
On the other hand, there are too many restaurants for similar purposes, and it is important to get a competitive advantage in this environment. Restaurants’ performances are increasingly dependent on online reviews with the development of technology. Many people use online reviews as reference points when deciding on restaurant selection. However, due to the nature of the decision-making process and subjective judgments, the evaluations contain uncertainty. In this chapter, Interval Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy (IVIF) sets are used to incorporate the uncertainty. Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets (IFSs) are one of the theories developed by different researchers to model the uncertainty after Zadeh’s (1965) development of fuzzy set theory. IFSs developed by Atanassov (1986) are defined by degree of membership, degree of non-membership, and degree of hesitancy (Zhang et al., 2016). IFSs are able to represent the uncertainty in a more comprehensively and meaningfully than fuzzy sets. Then, Atanassov and Gargov (1989) developed IVIF sets defined by membership and non-membership functions whose values are intervals (Zhang et al., 2016; Xu & Gou, 2017).