Purpose
This study aims to determine the level of satisfaction of secondary housing tourists in Vilcabamba.
Design/methodology/approach
The analysis of satisfaction of this tourism segment in a destination is essential for the different economic agents when evaluating various policies. The analysis is based on the answers provided to 16 items in a questionnaire administered to a representative sample (281 respondents). The authors have used the fuzzy logic to reduce ambiguity in the answers associated to subjective views of human beings who express themselves linguistically. A method based on the degree of similarity to ideal solutions has been used to obtain a classification of relevant satisfaction items.
Findings
The results indicate that the ideal solutions segments are represented by multicultural characteristics of second home tourists and the number of years they have been visiting Vilcabamba. The authors find that foreign tourists are more satisfied than Ecuadorians. Analyzing the most critical factors, it is seen that accessibility to the destination, socio-cultural environment and quality of water achieve a high priority.
Research limitations/implications
Second home tourists’ satisfaction has been studied with a limited set of 16 attributes, and some attributes also have a multidimensional nature, so a further study analyzing the scale will be needed in the future.
Originality/value
The present study fills an existing gap in the literature of secondary housing tourism where the existing previous research has been mainly focused on retirees’ secondary housing tourism. The study provides interesting insights into local and national authorities, as well as other economic agents, to designing strategies and planning processes of the destinations for secondary housing tourists.
The study aims to analyze the determinants for being an immigrant in Cuenca (Ecuador). Our analysis is based on the answers given to a scale formed by 30 items included in a questionnaire administered to a representative sample of 369 immigrants. A fuzzy hybrid multi-criteria decision-making method, TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution), is used to analyze whether immigrants are more or less exigent regarding the items included in the scale to reside in Cuenca. Then, a fuzzy clustering method is applied to analyze the differences observed in the main determinants observed over a number of traits according to their similarities to three obtained profiles: (1) extreme exigent immigrants; (2) extreme unneedful immigrants; and (3) intermediate exigent immigrants. Results show that items such as access to internet and benefits for retirees were highly valued by some immigrants. In addition, the authors found that information channels, reasons for immigrating, house location, main transport mode, income and main income source are the main determinants that differentiate whether the immigrants in Cuenca (Ecuador) are more or less demanding with respect to the exigency scale developed in the study. The main contributions to the body of knowledge, the policy implications and lines for future research are finally discussed.
One of the sources of information to detect the level of customer satisfaction is the set of reviews they leave on websites such as Trip Advisor. A problem arises when there is a large number of reviews and administrators have difficulty identifying those that reflect the client's feelings from the reviews. For this study, some applications generated in the Python programming language were used in order to assign an excellent and bad criterion by adding a feeling textually. The Sentistrength classifier was also used, which analyzes text to return a value of positive or negative sentiment; these two contexts were used mathematically and statistically to obtain referential data based on an analysis of the ROC curve with values of true positives and true negatives as well as false positives and false negatives.
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