Evaluating the Fitness Centers Using Integrated SWARA and EDAS Method: A Case Study

With people’s becoming aware of healthy life and healthy diet today, more time has begun to be spared for sports activities and this lead to an increase in the demands of fitness centers where sports activities can take place. With this heavy demand, great investments have been made in many city centers to open fitness centers; however, it has also been observed that most fitness centers entered economically into challenging processes due to intense competition. For the continuity of fitness centers, it is important to retain the current customers as well as to gain new customers. The purpose of this study is to determine the significance levels (weights) of the effective criteria in evaluating the fitness centers with the information received from numerous decision makers (DM’s) through the SWARA method among the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods; and to evaluate the fitness centers through the EDAS method among the MCDM methods by including the obtained criteria weights in the process. In case study, a total of 15 customers randomly selected from 3 different fitness centers that have the most customers in the Nazilli district of Ayd？n, which is the location of the application were taken as the DM’s. The survey was applied to 15 DM’s by considering the application stages of SWARA method, which is a MCDM method. The obtained data were evaluated in SWARA method. In the evaluation part of the study, six fitness centers with high customer intensity in Nazilli were taken as alternatives. As a result of the evaluation of the group decision matrix, obtained from the survey carried out with the five DM’s knowing about all these fitness centers (different from the DM’s evaluating the criteria), through the EDAS method among the MCDM methods; the fitness center having the highest score in the Nazilli district was determined