An approach to measuring website quality in the rural tourism industry based on Atanassov intuitionistic fuzzy sets

Abstract

Attracting new customers can be identified as one of the key roles websites play in the tourism and hotels industry that can be of special importance for less known tourist destinations, especially for rural tourism. However, some of current researches indicate that many first-time visitors spend a very short time on a particular webpage when accessing a particular website. Therefore, if we presume that the acquisition of new customers is one of the features of a website, such a website should be designed to obtain the attention of the first-time visitors and to keep them. Various elements of websites essential for obtaining the attention of website visitors and crucial for their satisfaction have been identified in numerous studies. As opposed to these studies, this paper focuses on designing a multiple criteria model that could realistically determine the quality of the website from the first-time visitors’ point of view. In order to form a realistic multiple criteria decision making model, the proposed approach is based on the use of a smaller number of criteria that are evaluated using Atanassov fuzzy sets. Also, in order to create a model which as simple as possible, based on Atanassov fuzzy sets, this approach uses the Singleton Intuitionistic Fuzzy Numbers. The use of the proposed approach for assessing the quality of some websites which promote tourist potentials of the Old Mountain indicates the applicability and efficiency of the proposed approach. Finally, with the proposed, or with some other, set of criteria, while retaining a relatively small number of criteria, the proposed approach can be successfully applied to the tourism and hotels industry, as well as to other areas, with the aim of determining the quality of the websites from the first-time visitors’ point of view.