Analyzing the Effect of Covid-19 Vaccination Requirements on Travelers’ Selection of Hotels: The Pcfgm-Fuzzy Vikor Approach

In the later stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, hotels take various measures to balance pandemic prevention and business operations. Some hotels require travelers to be fully vaccinated before they can check in, while others do not. In hotels of the latter type, travelers who are fully vaccinated may encounter others who are not. These have caused restrictions for travelers when choosing suitable hotels to stay in this period of time. To address this issue, the proportionally calibrated fuzzy geometric mean (pcFGM)-fuzzy VIšekriterijumskoKOmpromisnoRangiranje (fuzzy VIKOR) approach is proposed in this study to assist travelers in choosing suitable hotels to stay. In the proposed methodology, first, hotels are divided into two types by considering their requirements for COVID-19 vaccination. Then, a traveler is asked to list key factors considered in choosing hotels of the two types. To derive the priorities of these key factors, the pcFGM method is proposed. Subsequently, the fuzzy VIKOR method is devised to evaluate and compare the overall performances of hotels across different types to make a recommendation to the traveler. The applicability of the proposed methodology is illustrated with a real case study. According to experimental results, most hotels did not request travelers to be full vaccinated. Nevertheless, the hotels recommended to the traveler covered the two hotel types.