A Novel Evaluation Approach for Tourist Choice of Destination Based on Grey Relation Analysis

The decision-making process of choosing an ideal tourism destination is influenced by a number of psychological and nonpsychological variables. Tourists need a method to quickly and easily select a suitable destination. Driven by this practical decision issue, a novel approach of tourist destination evaluation, grey relation analysis (GRA), is developed and applied to the ranking evaluation of Taiwan tourism destinations in China. In the evaluating process, we apply entropy to calculate the weight of each index, which is a more objective method of calculating weights. The results of the study indicate that although the same size is small and the distribution of data is unknown, GRA can still be successfully used in evaluating tourist destinations. In addition, we compare the GRA results with the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and show that more accurate ranking results can be obtained.