Copyright © 2012 Yi-Chung Hu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Homestay industry in Taiwan is not only thriving, but also its operation is moving gradually toward elaboration strategy and in a specialized-operation manner these years. Nevertheless, the evaluation frameworks of the earlier studies were sporadically constructed from an overall perspective of homestays. Moreover, the functions, operational model, and natures of homestays are dissimilar to those of hotels; therefore, if the evaluation criteria of homestays employ the ones of hotels, it would appear to be incoherent and incompatible. This study has accordingly developed and constructed a set of evaluation indicators tailor-made for homestay sector through discussion of literatures and interviewing experts so that the evaluation framework would be more comprehensive and more practical. In the process of interviewing experts, it was discovered that dependences lay on the aspects and criteria. Consequently, this research chose the ANP (analytic network process) to get the weights and, further, to acquire the homestay business performance through fuzzy theory. The result reveals, as regards key aspects, homestay proprietors and customer groups both weight the surroundings of the building and features, service quality, operation, and management most. In respect to overall homestay performance, customer groups consider it has reached the satisfactory level.