Hotel Evaluation and Performance Ranking Using the Spherical Fuzzy MARCOS Method: An Application in Gaziantep Province

The tourism and hospitality sector faces intense competition and increasingly complex service quality expectations, making hotel evaluation and performance ranking a multi-criteria decision-making problem under uncertainty. This study develops a Spherical Fuzzy MARCOS (SF-MARCOS)-based framework for evaluating and ranking hotels while accounting for the uncertainty and subjectivity inherent in expert judgments. The proposed framework is applied to hotel alternatives in Gaziantep Province, Türkiye, providing a realistic decision environment for assessing competing performance dimensions. The results identify service quality, hygiene and safety standards, environmental sustainability, hotel location, and operational flexibility as key determinants of hotel performance. The ranking reveals clear performance differences among the evaluated alternatives, with leading hotels achieving superior results through balanced performance across the considered criteria. Weight perturbation analysis demonstrates that the ranking is generally stable under variations in criterion weights, although some changes occur among medium-performing alternatives. Comparative analysis with SF-TOPSIS, SF-VIKOR, and SF-COBRA shows substantial consistency, particularly for the highest- and lowest-ranked alternatives, supporting the robustness and reliability of the proposed approach. The study contributes to the limited literature integrating spherical fuzzy logic with the MARCOS methodology for hotel evaluation under uncertain and imprecise expert assessments. The proposed framework provides tourism managers and decision-makers with a structured and reliable tool for benchmarking hotel performance and identifying areas requiring improvement. The findings also offer practical insights for sustainable and competitive hospitality management.