An Integrated AHP-TOPSIS for Evaluating Online Marketing Strategies for the Hospitality Industry

Lanndon Ocampo,Adelfa Rose Guinandal,Celbert Mirasol Himang,Kafferine Yamagishi,Angel Merabueno,Orlyn Besabella,Marife Fallore

doi:10.4018/ijabim.20210701.oa11

Abstract

Online marketing has been the most efficient and useful platform for reaching target markets and building customer relations. Despite its widespread use, the hospitality industry is at its forefront of identifying its most suitable online marketing strategies. This emphasis is crucial to strategic marketing and resource allocation decisions, which may impact the long-term performance of businesses. The need to address both perspectives of customers and businesses, along with the multiple online marketing strategies under the presence of multiple criteria, requires a rigorous analytical and comprehensive approach for evaluating the efficacy of these strategies for the hospitality industry. Thus, this work offers an integrated approach based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) as a decision-making platform for the problem domain. The AHP assigns the corresponding priority weights of the criteria associated with either customers' or businesses' perspectives, while the TOPSIS ranks the importance of the strategies. Results show that the credibility of an online marketing strategy is of the highest priority for the customers, while the businesses highly regard customer loyalty. With the AHP-TOPSIS approach, findings reveal that both perspectives prefer search engines for the hospitality industry. Illustrating the results via a priority tradeoff map of two perspectives, search engines, websites, and blogs are deemed the most viable online marketing strategies relevant to the industry. These findings offer dependable guidelines for the hospitality industry in positioning their online marketing efforts.

Highlights

In Asian countries, the service industry contributes 60% or more of their GDP (Park & Shin, 2012)
Illustrating the results via a priority tradeoff map of two perspectives, search engines, websites, and blogs are deemed the most viable online marketing strategies relevant to the industry. These findings offer dependable guidelines for the hospitality industry in positioning their online marketing efforts
WORKS With an increased interest in online marketing, the hospitality industry is at the forefront of adopting such a platform to disseminate the value proposition of products and services

Summary

Introduction

In Asian countries, the service industry contributes 60% or more of their GDP (Park & Shin, 2012). The increasing use of the Internet promotes the dramatic growth of online marketing. In the hospitality industry, online reservation systems (Guo et al, 2013; Ozturk et al, 2016) and websites (Gan et al, 2007) have become increasingly dominant. Those that have online leads are growing more than those without online leads. The growing awareness of the potential leverage when implementing online marketing is seen, as the service industry is putting in more resources to it as the industry sees it tantamount to increasing company’s brand awareness and sales (Mustafi et al, 2011)

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