Design and development of a fuzzy expert system for hotel selection

In this paper, we describe the research and development of a fuzzy expert system for hotel selection. A prototype system, called hotel advisory system (HAS), has been designed and developed to assist tourists in conducting hotel selection using fuzzy logic. HAS is implemented on personal computers under a Microsoft WindowsTM environment. To evaluate the performance of HAS, selected practitioners in the Hong Kong hotel industry and potential users from twelve nations were invited to participate in testing the system. The potential users and hotel experts rated highly on the effectiveness and the usability of the system. The results of the prototype evaluation were satisfactory and support the contention that HAS performs its functions as expected. The viability of HAS as an effective procedure for hotel selection has been ascertained by the positive feedback obtained from the survey questionnaires. Using HAS makes hotel selection simple because it can incorporate the linguistic terms which are normally produced by tourists.