Analysing the Relationship Between Urban Infrastructure and Attracting Urban Tourists by Using TOPSIS and AHP Models

Abstract

Identification of top tourism spots (often referred to as “honeypots”) has been always considered important in tourism planning issues, but the approach has been somewhat passive (i.e. simply “counting” visitors). Strengthening these areas as main tourist destinations can help provide more and better services for tourists visiting these destinations. Accordingly, it can be linked to tourism infrastructure, which can play an important role in tourism development. The main aim of this paper is to determine and rank the factors attracting tourist in Isfahan province by combining analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) models. To achieve the objectives of this paper and to emphasize the importance of tourism in the Isfahan province, different cities in the province were selected as samples. In this exploratory research, the systematic view of AHP and TOPSIS as well as Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software was used for data analysis. The preliminary result obtaining from TOPSIS model shows that the city of Isfahan, Shahin Shahr, and Kashan were the first three cities ranking in terms of having proper tourism infrastructure. In the second stage, two models were combined and the results show that the cities of Isfahan and Kashan are the top two tourism destinations in the province. Such work can be used by planners and policy-makers to allocate resources.