Applying the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) Approach to Convention Site Selection

decision makers in allocating limited resources to strategic investment such as marketing, positioning, and so on. In general , AHP uses information from the literature and empirical experiences to define a general structure, and implements pairwise comparison information from decision makers to model decision making. Satty's (1980) AHP is a pairwise comparison procedure designed to capture relative judgments in a manner that ensures consistency. This article presents a decision-making model based on AHP for convention site selection. By using the proposed model, it is possible not only to provide a general understanding of decision factors but also to determine the relative weight of critical attributes affecting site selection. The remainder of this article is structured as follows. Section 2 reviews the past studies on convention site selection. Section 3 presents the AHP method. Section 4 describes the development of the AHP model, then reports and discusses the estimation results from the proposed AHP model. Finally, section 5 provides some concluding remarks. The convention site selection process is potentially very complex due to the multitude of variables that influence a decision (Clark and McCleary 1995). Based on their comprehensive review of the site selection literature, Crouch and Ritchie (1998) proposed a 5-step conceptual model of the site selection process and identified several categories of site selection factors, together with various antecedent conditions and competing sites influences. The five steps are convention preplanning, site selection analysis and recommendations, site selection decision, convention held, and postconvention evaluation. The factors affecting the site selection decision can be broadly divided into site-specific and association factors (Weber and Chon 2002). Fortin, Ritchie, and Arsenault (1976) found that there is a relationship between the importance of site selection factors and the structure of association Ching-Fu Chen is an associate professor in the Department of Transportation and Communication Management Science at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. The author thanks Miss Yu-Hua Hsiao for her great help in this study's empirical data collection. The convention sector is one of the fastest growing and most lucrative areas of the tourism industry. Solving for the most salient determinants in selecting or organizing a destination for conventions and seeing out their success is an important research topic. This study proposes the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) approach, a decision-making method based on pairwise comparisons between criteria, to construct an evaluation structure with criteria and associated weights of convention site selection for meeting …