Online reviews-oriented hotel selection: A large-scale group decision-making method based on the expectations of decision makers

As there are an increasing number of people who prefer to travel as a group, hotel selection during group travel has become a problem worth investigating. From the large-scale group decision-making perspective, a method for hotel selection based on online reviews and the expectation of decision makers is proposed in this research. This method mainly includes two stages: constructing an evaluation matrix and large-scale group decision-making for hotel selection. In the first stage, the evaluation of alternative hotels is obtained from the sentiment analysis result of online reviews for hotels. In the second stage, according to the expectations of decision makers and prospect theory, the prospect value for alternative hotels can be obtained. Then, a large-scale group decision-making model based on the prospect value is proposed. In this model, a novel clustering method based on the similarity among decision makers is provided. Additionally, a feedback mechanism for decision makers to adjust expectations is presented in this research. Finally, the viability of the proposed method is demonstrated by an illustrative example in which hotel selection is conducted through TripAdvisor.com. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been demonstrated through extensive simulation experiments. The comparative analysis highlights the features of the method proposed in this paper.