Determination of the thermal hotel location: application of analytic hierarchy process

Abstract

Purpose – In recent years, as other sectors, there is an increasing trend of competition in thermal hotel sector. The aim of this study is to determine the importance of the factors on thermal hotel location via Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The study is conducted in one of the most famous thermal cities, Afyonkarahisar-Turkey. Methodology – AHP is used to determine the best location among all alternative locations. Findings – According to the results of AHP, Environmental Factors are found to be the most important factor in determining the location of the thermal hotel. The other factors according to their importance are; Features of the Construction, Costs of Investment, Location of the Construction, Competitive Factors and Demographic Structures respectively. Within Environmental Factors, the sub-factor Closeness to Thermal Water was found to be the most important. Value/originality – Determination of the location of a new hotel is very important for thermal tourism investors and also it is one of the most difficult factors for them. While they determine the most suitable location, they have to think about different criteria and all other alternatives. Other factors like features of the construction, environmental factors, competitive factors and demographic structures are almost as important as the location of the hotel which also has some sub factors. This study focused on how to determine the best hotel location via AHP.

Design of a Thermal Hotel Based on AHP-QFD Methodology

“…Since AHP allows for the calculation of the consistency index during comparison, it is preferred for decisionmaking in MCDM. Due to its simplicity, ease of use, and great flexibility, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been studied extensively and used in nearly all applications related to multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) since its development [31,[47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55]. Thus, the application of AHP has become a popular research method in various fields for assessing, rating, and determining the importance weightings for selection indicators or criteria [31,52].…”

“…Based on the eigenvalue method, Saaty [2] developed a consistency index to quantify the inconsistency level of multiplicative reciprocal matrices [46,54,55]. Then, Saaty's consistency index is defined as follows (Fomulas (1) and ( 2)) [46,49,50,52,54]:…”

Factors influencing recommendation of sub-Saharan Africa travel products: A Hong Kong–Kenya importance–performance analysis

“…Despite claimed theoretical and empirical deficiency (e.g. focus on predetermined attributes’ performance (Burns, 1986), judgment being influenced by the objectivity of the respondents (Santos and Boote, 2003), the subjectivity of researchers in deciding where to draw the crosshairs within the importance–performance grid (Lee, 2015), being considered less powerful in providing more detailed managerial implications than relevance–determinance analysis (RDA) (Mikulić et al, 2017) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) (Emir and Saraçli, 2014)), the explanatory power of IPA is well-recognized among researchers. IPA has been widely used within tourism studies for example to examine tourist receiving countries (Enright and Newton, 2004), government role in tourism destination development (Rašovská et al, 2020), and service vendors such as theme parks (Cheng et al, 2016) and hotels (Lai and Hitchcock, 2016).…”