Supplier Selection for Cold Chain Products in the Tourism Sector

This study performs an evidence-based supplier selection (SS) for five-star hotels to pro-cure cold chain products (CCP). In this research, while the first phase includes evaluating three suppliers through the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), the second covers ELECTRE I to rank participants’ supplier preferences. Our findings are limited to fresh fruits and vegetables as CCP. The sample consists of the purchasing specialists of 7 five-star hotels operating in Antalya-Turkey that depend on CCP. We collected the data through two face-to-face meetings. The first meeting focused on identifying and comparing the hotels’ CCP procurement criteria. In the second meeting, we performed pairwise comparisons of three alternative suppliers by each criterion. The AHP demonstrates Quality (K1) and Delivery (K2) are the most important criteria with equal weights for CCP procurement. The ELEC-TRE I method yields the final preference ranking as Supplier 1>Supplier 3>Supplier 2. Overall, we conclude Supplier 1 to be the most suitable supplier for participating hotels for CCP procurement.The starting point of this study is the apparent paucity of research in the relevant literature on CCP procurement and SS in the tourism sector. Despite a few at-tempts to bring insights into SS in the sector, there is still a substantial gap in SS for CCP. We believe this study would cultivate a way of closing such a gap in the literature.