Abstract
Extremadura (Spain), being one of the less-developed EU regions, is also eligible for European funds, including those related with the development of tourism activities in rural areas. To assess the spatial distribution of rural tourism potential (RTP), a methodological approach was followed by combining the synergetic use of geographic information systems (GIS) and the analytical hierarchical process (AHP). For the evaluation model, six factors were examined and hierarchized by a panel of eighteen experts: tourism accommodation offer, activities in natural areas, gastronomic offer, cultural activities, bath offer in natural environments, and activities in active tourism. These factors were then decomposed into thirty-two evaluation criteria and the relative importance of their weights was estimated using pairwise judgments. Using publicly available data and volunteered geographic information (VGI) platforms, the related spatial and non-spatial data were collected, collated, and standardized, employing appropriate tools developed with open-source GIS software. The results, represented by a series of intensity maps, indicate the RTP scores, highlight the strengths and weaknesses in each county, and could serve as a planning tool for public and/or private investments.
Highlights
According to the latest report of World Tourism Organization (WTO), Spain was the third most visited country with a total of 68.2 million visitors in 2015 [1]
This paper proposes a methodology for assessing the potential of rural tourism
For the spatialization of the evaluation criteria, we have adopted the raster cell as the spatial evaluation unit. This spatial structure can accommodate the different spatial dimensions of the criteria involved in the evaluation model, and allows us to have a detailed mapping of the continuous variation of rural tourism potential over the study area
Summary
According to the latest report of World Tourism Organization (WTO), Spain was the third most visited country with a total of 68.2 million visitors in 2015 [1]. Analytical hierarchical process (AHP) methodology has been used together with geographic information systems (GIS) tools in several research studies that have, in common, the territory as the physical framework: land use and general suitability analysis [21,22,23,24], natural resources management [25,26] suitable location of engineering projects [27], and urban and regional planning [28,29,30,31,32,33] This methodological approach is considered as a new and powerful research tool, the difficulty and complexity of the methodology can produce inaccurate results if it does not consider the specificity of the tourism sector. Unlike other studies, where GIS has been used as a mere display or feature calculator, in this study GIS was used as a tool for processing, managing, and integrating, in a spatial database, the various geometries and attributes of spatial data
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