Journal of Tourism & Hospitality
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A Strategic Approach to Tourism Development Barriers in Iran

Nima Golghamat Raad^{* *}Correspondence: Nima Golghamat Raad, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, Tel: 989138050456, Email:

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Introduction

Tourism is one of the world's fastest growing industries as well as a major source of foreign income and job creation. The tourism industry of each country is rooted in people, places, heritage, and values of the country. The governments should make policies, plans to provide economic, social, and environmental benefits through tourism . The ability of the national economy to benefit from tourism depends on the volume of investment in tourism infrastructures and on ability to satisfy the needs of tourists.

Iran, a country with an area of 626336 miles2, has a unique diversity of cultural, ethnic, linguistic, climatic, architectural and historical features. Iran has 30 UNESCO-Registered landmarks and 74 other sites and monuments in the pilot list of this international organization. Iran has burning deserts, humid forests, and cold mountainous regions. Also, the existence of a number of sacred Shiite shrines in this country, has provided a good position in the field of religious tourism for Iran. Affordable costs, as well as advanced medical and health services in Iran, have made this country one of the most potent countries to become a medical tourism hub in the region and even in the world. Iran is comparable with countries such as Egypt, Greece, India, Italy and Turkey in terms of its historical significance and cultural and natural glory. Iran ranked first in terms of price competitiveness tourism in the world. Despite the high potential of Iran at generating income and improving the economic situation through the tourism industry, the indicators do not show a satisfying situation in this field.. The indices of the travel and tourism industry are brought in Table 1. The rank and score of Iran in each index are specified and then are compared to the best performance in that index. Relative Functionality of Iran in each index is obtained by dividing the score of the country into the best performance [1-4].

Table 1: Tourism Indices, and rank and relative functionality of Iran in them.

Iran's ranking in all the indicators is worse than average in the Middle East. Several reasons have been mentioned in the literature for failure of the tourism industry in Iran, such as the mostly unfavorable view of Iran in the world, political tensions with the West for more than three decades, poor and unstable management, weak and ineffective advertising, and lack of tourism infrastructures such as hotels, restaurants, efficient transportation system, sanitation facilities, and the regulations of Hijab in this country [5-7].

Literature Review

The World Tourism Organization proposes a framework for designing the Tourism Master Plan. The first and most important step is to formulate a long-term development framework for tourism (10-20 years) with emphasis on policy and strategy, planning, institutional strengthening, legislation and regulation, product development and diversification, marketing and promotion, tourism infrastructure and superstructure, economic impact of tourism and tourism investment, human resource development, and socio-cultural and environmental impacts of tourism. Then, divide the plan into short- term (three-year) action plans to expand sustainable tourism and prepare several demonstration projects for pilot areas. The responsibility of designing such a plan is on the National Tourism Organization (NTO) which is an official organization in each country in which planning for development and promotion of the country's tourism section is carried out. Comprehensiveness and power of this organization depend on political, social, cultural, environmental, and economic conditions of the country and the importance of the tourism industry in it. In the following, the experience of some countries in the development of tourism strategies is mentioned [8-13].

Myanmar tourism master plan (2013-2020) has 6 Strategic Programs including Strengthening the Institutional Environment, Building Human Resource Capacity and Promote Service Quality, Strengthening Safeguards and Procedures for Destination Planning and Management, Developing Quality Products and Services, Improving Connectivity and Tourism–Related Infrastructure, and Building the Image, Position, and Brand of Tourism Myanmar. This master plan consists of 24 key objectives and 76 activities. Then, 38 Strategic Projects are proposed for Implementation from 2013 to 2020. The estimated cost and priority of each project and programs are determined by the planners [14-18].

Vietnam has also prepared a tourism master plan up to 2020. This master plan includes the following key contents: evaluating the previous plan, resources for tourism development, SWOT analysis, development perspective forecast, development vision and objectives, direction of key areas development, and implementation measurements.

The tourism master plan of Kuala Lumpur (2015-2025) details out 47 initiatives that covers 9 segments and all key enablers. With the vision to transform Kuala Lumpur into a world-class tourism destination, these initiatives aim to enhance the city’s current tourism activities and enrich its offerings with new products and services. These segments are culture and heritage, shopping, entertainment, nature and adventure, luxury travel, sports, business and MICE, and medical and wellness. According to this document, steps towards designing a tourism master plan include:

• Identifying and building consensus on issues and challenges affecting the tourism industry, in particular the various tourism segments

• Developing a long list of potential ideas to enhance the tourism industry

• Prioritizing and defining clear initiatives for implementation, which include consolidation of ideas into themes and topics and assessment of each initiative based on ease of implementation and impact.

The Tourism Strategic Plan of Sri Lanka cites four main reasons for the failure of the tourism master plans, including coordination failures, institutional failures, market failures, and resource failures, and lists the causes of the failures [19-23].

Iran wants to develop its first tourism development document in the near future. According to the 20-year perspective, Iran's share of the world tourism industry should reach from 0.09 percent in 2004 to 1.5 percent in 2025 (around 20 million tourists). The active policies of Iran in the field of diplomacy and the nuclear deal have led to the growth of Iran's tourism industry and a clear future for it. The most important programs of the government in the field of tourism development are as follows:

• Modifying the current regulations and instructions

• Providing a credit of $ 25 billion and for around 1,300 projects

• Increasing the duration of the airport visa from 15 days to 30 days

• Issuance of electronic visa

• Human resource training for 16,000 people who work in the tourism industry

• Establishing tourism Information in 11 high-potential countries

• Developing international hotels and facilities and building residential centers

• Expanding the religious tourism

• Development of domestic tourism

• Supporting the private companies which have tourism-related activities in the web

• Expanding the transportation networks (land, air, rail, and marine)

Strategic Management tools and techniques are widely used by Iranian researchers to develop strategies for improving the tourism industry in this country. Some of these studies are focused on a specific tourism type, and the others study the entire industry. Scope of some of the studies is the whole country, but most of them focus on specific case studies. Medical Tourism has mentioned in several studies as one of the main strengths of the tourism industry in Iran. Ecotourism is one other important tourism type in Iran due to the climate diversity and unique nature of the country. Several studies have done in Iran that uses SWOT analysis for ecotourism strategic planning. Rural Tourism, Religious Tourism, Urban Tourism, and Sport Tourism are other types of tourism about which strategic studies and planning have carried out [24-28].

Although the methods and tools used in researches that study just one type of tourism are identical with those that study the entire tourism industry, the comprehensiveness of the strategies and development barriers reflected in the second category of research makes it more beneficial for policymakers and decision-makers in the tourism industry. Table 2 conveys some of the nationalscale tourism studies which have conducted to identify barriers to tourism development in Iran [29,30].

Table 2: National-scale studies about tourism development in Iran.

Methodology

PESTEL analysis

PESTEL is a tool in strategic management that helps the decisionmakers analyze the external environment of their organization and set their strategies based on the possible changes in the future. In this research, PESTEL analysis is used to identify the political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal barriers that hinder tourism development in Iran. The barriers are listed based on 21 tourism experts' opinions in academic and administrative levels and obtained with the Delphi technique. Table 3 shows the list of the barriers in 6 categories.

Table 3: Tourism development barriers obtained with PESTEL analysis.

These barriers can be seen from another perspective. Each barrier is related to one of the tourism indicators mentioned at Table 1. The performance of Iran in each barrier can be defined as the relative performance of the indicator that is related to this barrier [31-33].

Friedman test

Friedman's test is a non-parametric statistical test that was invented by Milton Friedman. This test is used to compare three or more matched groups. Friedman test first ranks the values in each matched set (each row) from low to high. This test is used in this study to rank the tourism development barriers. This test has been carried out with SPSS16 software. The results of this test are shown in Table 4. The test statistics show that the degree of importance of the barriers is not the same [34].

Table 4: Friedmzan test result.

DEMATEL analysis

DEMATRL stands for Decision Making Trial and Evaluation. This technique was developed by Fonetla and Gabus in 1971. DEMATEL is a comprehensive method for the development and analysis of a structural model that includes causal relationships between complex factors. DEMATEL operates based on directed graphs, and these graphs are able to display directed relationships between factors. The result of the DEMATEL method is the division of the factors into two groups of cause and effect. This technique is used in this research to identify the pivotal barriers that lead to the other barriers. The steps of this technique is brought in the following:

• Direct relation matrix: A four-level scale is required to measure the relationship between the factors with the help of experts. This scale is used to describe the relationship of factors are: 0 (ineffective), 1 (low impact), 2 (high impact), and 3 (very high impact). The next step is getting the expert's opinion by pairwise comparisons. The result of this stage is shown by matrix Z, and its components are shown by Zij that represents the effect of criterion i on criterion j.

• Normalizing the direct relationship matrix: The direct relations matrix Z can be converted into a normalized matrix of direct relations using eqns. (1) and (2).

(1)

X=S.Z (2)

Total relation matrix: After obtaining the normalized direct relations matrix (X), the total relations matrix (T) can be calculated using eqn. (3) in which (I) is the identity matrix.

T = X (I −X) ⁻¹ (3)

• Causal diagram: Summation of rows and columns of matrix T are respectively called D and R vectors. The horizontal axis of the diagram is called the Importance Axis and is equal to (D + R). Similarly, the vertical axis is called Dependence Axis and is equal to (D-R). Basically, when (D-R) is positive, the criterion is a cause. Otherwise, the criterion is an effect.

The matrix Z of this research is shown in eqn. (4).

(4)

After doing the mentioned calculations, the cause and effect diagram of this research is plotted. The diagram is shown in Figure 1 [31-33].

Figure 1: Results of the Dematel analysis.

Importance-performance analysis

Martila and James developed and used the Importance-Performance analysis for the first time in``. Today, however, the IP analysis has become a well-known management tool and is widely used to identify the weaknesses and strengths of businesses, products, services, and the prioritization of improvement opportunities.

The matrix of this model consists of two axes: the horizontal axis represents the Importance, and the vertical axis represents the performance. The concept of each of the four regions of this matrix is this:

Quarter 1: Continuation of the current situation: It conveys factors with high importance and satisfactory performance. The best strategy for these factors is to keep the current performance level up.

Quarter 2: Reducible Area: This quarter encompasses factors with low importance at which the organization (or country) has great performance. Decision-maker would be better to put less attention to these factors.

Quarter 3: Lower Priority: It conveys factors with low importance and weak performance. As these factors are not important very much, they are not the top priorities.

Quarter 4: The critical area: It encompasses factors with high importance in which the performance level is low. These indicators seem to be at a critical stage and need immediate attention. The solutions that are related to these factors should be the priority.

In this research, the barriers whose ranks are 15 or higher are in the high-importance category, and the others are in the low-importance category. Also, the barriers whose related tourism indicators have a relative performance of 0.5 or more, are in the high-performance category, and the others are in the low-performance category. Therefore, the IP matrix can be developed (Figure 2) [34-37].

Figure 2: The IP matrix.

Listing and evaluating strategies

At this stage, a list of strategies is created by reviewing the literature and gathering experts' opinions. These strategies help to overcome the barriers in quarter 4 of the IP matrix. The list is shown in Table 5.

Table 5: List of the proposed strategies.

The next step is to evaluate and rank the strategies. Political, economic, socio-cultural, technological, environmental, and legal impacts, are used to prioritize these strategies. The scores are obtained from experts' opinions. The experts are asked to express their opinion about the impact of each strategy on each criteria by a number between 0 (lowest impact) to 10 (highest impact). CRITIC technique is used to determine weights for the criteria, and VIKOR technique is employed to evaluate the importance of each strategy [38,39].

Criteria weights

The CRITIC approach is an objective method for determining the weight of the criteria. This is carried out by correlation coefficients and standard deviations. The first step in this method is to formulate a decision matrix in which the columns are made up of criteria and rows of options. In this method, there is no difference between positive and negative criteria in determining the weights [40,41].

The second step is the decision matrix normalization. Eqn. (5) is employed to do this. After this step, all elements will be between 0 and 1.

(5)

Then, the amount of available information in each criterion must be calculated. This value is represented by C_j (equation 6).

(6)

σ_j is the standard deviation of criterion j and r_ij shows the correlation of criteria i and j. According to the CRITIC, the higher the amount of obtainable information for a criterion, the more relative importance of that criterion. In step 3, the weight of each criterion is calculated using eqn. (7).

(7)

Table 6 contains the result of CRITIC technique in this study

Table 6: Weights of the criteria obtained by the CRITIC method.

Strategy prioritization

VIKOR is an MCDM tool that solves decision problems with conflicting criteria with different units, considering that compromise is allowable for conflict resolution, the decision maker aims to find a solution that is the closest to the ideal, and the alternatives are evaluated according to all criteria. VIKOR uses LP-Metric method (Equation 8) to find the best solution.

(8)

In this equation, w_j is the weight of criterion j obtained with CRITIC method, P represents LP parameter, f_ij is the value of solution i in criterion j, f_j and f_jare the best and the worst f_ij respectively.

L_1i is represented with T_j and can be obtained by eqn. (9).

(9)

L_∞i is represented with R_j and can be obtained by eqn. (10).

(10)

Also, obtain by eqn. (11) and (12) respectively.

For positive criteria:

(11)

For negative criteria:

(12)

And finally, Qi obtains by eqn. (13). The less is this variable for a criterion, the higher is its rank according to the VIKOR method.

(13)

(14)

Table 7 contains the final ranking of the proposed strategies obtained by the VIKOR method [42-47].

Table 7: Final Ranking of Strategies using VIKOR method.

Conclusion

This research employs a set of MCDM and strategic management tools to overcome the tourism development barriers in Iran. The results show that the main barrier to the tourism industry of Iran is the political tensions of this country some other countries. These tensions have severely damaged Iran's image and influenced the tourism arrival rate. Besides, tourism investors have no tendency to invest in the tourism infrastructure of Iran due to lack of political and economic stability. On the other hand, unprecedented sanctions on the economy of Iran have limited business transactions of this country with the world and decreased business trips to Iran very much. So in this study, the political barriers have been identified as the root cause of other barriers, especially economic ones. The economic hardships have hindered tourism-related construction projects, advertisement programs, festivals, events, loans, and other activities. Also, some legal barriers have made tourists disappointed from traveling to Iran. This research shows that the country has to focus on these issues to make Iran a more attractive tourism destination. The current tourism development strategies of Iran do not address these barriers, so this study has proposed a set of new strategies which are proportionate to Iran's problems and weaknesses. The strategies are ranked by MADM methods. The outcome shows that those strategies which are related to political issues (S16, S7), project finance issues (S20), and tourism infrastructure (S23, S10) are the absolutely necessary strategies for Iran's tourism industry.

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