Towards an Improved Hotel Reservation System: A Fuzzy Approach to Improve Service Industries

1. Introduction

Kenteris, Gavalas and Economou (2009) stated that the convergence of IT and communications technologies and the rapid evolution of the Internet have been some of the most influential factors in tourism that have changed travelers’ behavior. The hotel industry is one of the leading stakeholders in the tourism sector. This industry has been influenced by the internet in a deep way. Normally, hotels that have a purchase site online where they offer a catalogue, requires that the client searches the whole site looking for the service he or she desires. This forces the client to know some concrete aspects of the service to make successive searches in the different categories in which the products or services supplied by the company are included. How to deliver relevant information to both potential and existing customers has become an important task for the hospitality industry (Xiang et al. 2007), which, in many cases, is based on artificial intelligence techniques (Schiaffino & Amandi, 2009).

On the other hand, in order to model human logic in a mathematical way within computer environment, we resort to the so-called fuzzy logic, which allows expressing different values or levels of truth for a certain concept. This means that it is not codified in the binary form false/true, but in a similar way to the human reasoning, with rules like “if...., then...”, using the theory of fuzzy logic and sets. The fuzzy or diffuse logic transforms inputs into outputs, a fuzzy set into another one. The rules of a fuzzy set define a set of zones that are overlapped, relating a complete series of inputs to another complete series of outputs.

Taking full advantage of fuzzy logic theories and expert systems, in this work authors present an architecture that support hotel reservation systems. The computer application of these theories is shaped in the denominated Expert Systems based on fuzzy knowledge, which use previously the information provided by experts in each concrete field. This way, the system works with flexibility responding to hotel reservation systems. Thanks to these systems we can model the knowledge of an expert in a certain field and construct therefore the necessary rules to respond to the concrete necessities of a client. In the following section we introduce the theory of fuzzy logic and sets and its application within the denominated expert systems.