Determining the importance of hotel services by using transitivity thresholds

Customers’ preferences related to the quality, the change and the progress of their expectations have turned the quality in an indispensable competitive factor for hotel enterprises. The hotels have to evaluate the customer satisfaction and to assign to each factor a weight, expressing its importance for their customers. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the importance of hotel services. Our analysis involves more than 300 customers that answered to a survey and it takes into account five criteria: Food, Cleanliness, Staff, Price/benefit and Comfort. To derive the ranking of preferences we used pairwise comparisons. The main issue linked to pairwise comparisons is the consistency of judgements. Transitivity thresholds recently proposed in literature give meaningful information about the reliability of the preferences. Our study shows how the use of ordinal threshold may provide a ranking of services different from that obtained by applying traditional consistency Saaty thresholds.