Impact assessment of farm tourism sites using a hybrid MADM-based composite sustainability index

Abstract

ABSTRACT The increasing popularity of providing composite sustainable indicators for various tourism sectors has paved the way for different evaluation methods that comprehensively assess the sustainability of tourism sites. Due to various sustainability issues significantly relevant to farm tourism, a holistic evaluation of farm tourism sites must be carried out. Thus, this study proposes an integrated fuzzy Delphi, fuzzy best-worst method (BWM), and fuzzy simple additive weighting (SAW) methodological framework to generate a composite sustainability index evaluation of farm tourism sites. The proposed approach adopts an inclusive indicator-based system primarily used in sustainability performance evaluation. This framework was applied in the case of an organic farm tourism site. It was performed in three primary steps: (1) the fuzzy Delphi approach was used to establish a relevant set of sustainable farm tourism indicators from a set of sustainable ecotourism indicators previously reported in the literature, (2) the fuzzy BWM was then used to generate the weights of the established indicators, and (3) the fuzzy SAW method was used to obtain a single-valued composite sustainability score. The integrated methodological framework offered in this work generates a single-valued score representing the sustainability status of farm tourism sites that can aid planning and decision-making.