Determining the social media preference of travel agencies in holiday marketing with multi criteria decision making methods

Evolving internet and information technologies require digital transformation to maintain the dynamic structure of travel agencies, one of the active actors in the tourism industry. Social media has a particularly strong influence on growing demand for online travel and tourism. The purpose of this study is to help travel agencies make the best decision in their choice as a marketing tool for social media, which is widely used in different sectors. The study initially incorporated four different objective weighting techniques to weight the criteria: Entropy, CRITIC, Standard Deviation and Equal Weight. Objective weights of the criteria were included in the solution steps of the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), Simple Additive Weighting (SAW), Multi Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT), Additive Ratio Assessment (ARAS), Multi Objective Optimization on the Basis of Ratio Analysis (MOORA-Refrence Point), Complex Proportional Assessment (COPRAS) and Vise Kriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) methods and the performance rankings of the social media platforms were found. Different sort results from methods based on objective weight classes were combined with a method of data consolidation, the Borda Count method, resulting in a single integrated sequence. According to the result of the social media platforms' sequence, Facebook ranked first, Instagram ranked second, and YouTube ranked third. Then, the consistency correlation values between the results obtained from the methods and the integrated sequencing result were evaluated.