A REPRESENTATIVE REVIEW OF FUZZY LOGIC APPLICATIONS IN TOURISM RESEARCH

Tourism offers many tangible benefits to society with the industry playing an importantcontributory role in the growth and development of the domestic economy. The quantum of research studies on tourism has increased substantially over the last twenty years in tandem with the upward trajectory of the global tourist industry. The many different dimensions and aspects of tourism have been explored by a wide and varied spectrum of research studies. As the entire world came to a standstill with the Covid-19 pandemic induced global lockdown, tourism research witnessed a steady growth in research publications although the industry itself as well as the intertwined hotel and hospitality sector were crippled by a miniscule virus and left battling for their very survival. This increased quantum of literary publication was particularly evident in Scopus and Web of Science which put forth several notable publications on the changing dynamics of the tourism industry. The present study is envisaged to offer aholistic view of the future growth trends of the tourism industry, which has been forced to rethink the very fabric of its functioning and reinvent itself to adapt to a changed environment that curbs the social interaction that the industry depends on to function. Fuzzy logic, a mathematical modelling that can predict outcomes based on inputted data, has gained a lot of attention in recent years as it is an effective tool that can be deployed to envisage a course of action for future scenarios and devise feasible solutions that can help tackle uncertain and ambiguous situations. The current research paper, comprehensively reviews highly cited noteworthy articles on fuzzy logic and its application in tourism, to offer a good understanding of the applications and advantages of this dynamic modelling tool whose use in a number of different fields may soon make it indispensable to research and development. This qualitative paper is constructed on the basis of content analysis of numerous important articles that werereviewed in-depth. Based on the observations and findings of the study, research directions for the future are proffered. This paper is novel in that it focuses on one particular segment of research, i.e. new computing methods based on fuzzy logic, and can greatly help upcoming researchers to explore the large number of real-life applications of this extremely useful tool and add meaningful knowledge to the existing literature with further research in the field of fuzzy logic models.