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

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.