Molodtsov introduced soft set theory as a new mathematical approach to handle uncertainty. Hybrid models have been found to be more useful than the individual components. Following this trend fuzzy soft sets (FSS) and intuitionistic fuzzy soft sets (IFSS) were introduced. Recently, soft sets were introduced by Tripathy and Arun (Int J Reasoning-Based Intell Syst 7(3/4):244–253, 2015) [6] using the notion of characteristic function. This led to the redefinitions of concepts like complement, intersection, union of IFSS, Null and absolute IFSS. In this paper, we follow the approach of Tripathy et al. in redefining IFSS and present an application of IFSS in decision-making which substantially improve and is more realistic than the algorithms proposed earlier by several authors. © Springer India 2016.