Applying Fuzzy Multiple Criteria Decision Making approach to establish safety-management system for hot spring hotels

ABSTRACT

Taiwan’s hot spring tourism has been booming for decades. In this study, a new procedure using a Fuzzy Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) integrated with a linguistic scale is proposed to set up measurable indicators and determine their weights for safety management in hot spring hotels. Twelve experts, including five professors, four hoteliers, and three officials, were invited to participate in this survey. To aggregate the results, water supply system gains the most weight (.426), followed by the bathing space design (.391) and maintenance system (.307). The main contributions of this paper are: (1) to integrate the Fuzzy MCDM with linguistic scale that converts the subjective cognitions of groups including scholars, owners and officials into a set of objective safety management indicators for hot spring hotels, and (2) to provide the governments and hoteliers with criteria to formulate reasonable regulations for hot springs tourism in terms of safety management.

KEY WORDS:

• hot spring
• Fuzzy Multiple Criteria Decision Making
• linguistic scale
• subjective cognitions
• safety management

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Education Department of Guangdong Province [grant number 2015GXJK036].