Determining and selecting an appropriate location to construct a hotel is one of the most challenging concerns which hotel industry investors are facing with. In this study we attempt to find a suitable response to this research/application need by a mathematical model using the queueing theory and the fuzzy logic. Therefore hotel, the reception system and travelers accommodations are formulate...

In this paper, we empirically estimate the economic value of different hotel characteristics, especially the location-based and service-based characteristics given the associated local infrastructure. We build a random coefficients-based structural model taking into consideration the multiple-levels of consumer heterogeneity introduced by different travel contexts and different hotel characteri...

User-Generated Content (UGC) on social media platforms and product search engines is changing the way consumers shop for goods online. However, current product search engines fail to effectively leverage information created across diverse social media platforms. Moreover, current ranking algorithms in these product search engines tend to induce consumers to focus on one single product character...

When consumers face many options, intermediaries can help by ranking them, which in turn can influence how consumers search and what they ultimately purchase. To understand such influence, it is crucial to separate the role the ranking plays in consumer choices from other characteristics of the firm. As the ranking is endogenous, separately identifying the role of the ranking is challenging. In...

The ICDM Challenge 2013 is to apply machine learning to the problem of hotel ranking, aiming to maximize purchases according to given hotel characteristics, location attractiveness of hotels, users aggregated purchase history and competitive online travel agency (OTA) information for each potential hotel choice. This paper describes the solution of team ”binghsu & MLRush & BrickMover”. We condu...

One of the common Web searches that have a strong local component is the search for hotel accommodation. Customers try to identify hotels that satisfy particular criteria, such as service, food quality, and so on. Unfortunately, today, the travel search engines provide only rudimentary ranking facilities, typically using a single ranking criterion such as distance from city center, number of st...

This paper presents a fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (FMCDM) model by integrating both subjective and objective weights for ranking and evaluating the service quality in hotels. The objective method selects weights of criteria through mathematical calculation, while the subjective method uses judgments of decision makers. In this paper, we use a combination of weights ob...

The performance of commercial websites is a critical issue that has a significant effect on consumers’ online decision-making. This study develops and applies a fuzzy model to assess the performance of hotel websites. It presents a fuzzy decision-making approach to the evaluation of tourism website performance that integrates consumer perceptions with a hierarchical model. The model consists of...

In this study we investigate the phenomenon of biased listing. Biased listing describes the practice of listing items in search engines or market platforms according to criteria other than the normally expected ones (e.g. relevance or quality). We were able to access real booking data from the hotel distribution platform provider Hotel.de. Hotel.de offers different contract types that have a di...

User-Generated Content (UGC) is changing the way consumers shop for goods. It is increasingly being recognized that the textual content of product reviews is an important determinant of consumers’ choices, over and above any numeric information. Similarly, websites that facilitate the creation of social tags by users can influence the desirability of a product or service. Moreover, one can harn...