A Novel Stakeholder-Driven Approach for Objective Hotel Quality Rating

Hotel quality rating systems play a crucial role in influencing tourists’ choices by shaping their expectations. This paper presents an innovative approach to objectively classify hotel quality within a stakeholder framework–considering perspectives of hotel management, market competitors, and virtual assessors. Our method combines the cross-efficiency paradigm of data envelopment analysis with the ordered weighted averaging operator for ranking the hotels, followed by K-means clustering for a robust five-star categorization. The efficacy of the approach is substantiated through the assessment of 58 hotels in Oman, showcasing its reliability and differentiation from the official hotel star-rating system.