An AHP Approach to Identify the Barriers of Sustainable Geotourism Development in Iran: an Economic View

This study aims to identify barriers to sustainable geotourism development in Iran with an economic view. On the national horizons of Iran in which development targets for 2025 are defined, Iran intends to become one of the major tourist destinations in the world, and it can make more worthwhile the importance of this research. Therefore, this research focuses on identifying the barriers to sustainable geotourism development. This study uses the AHP method with Expert Choice 10.0 software. Experts in the field of tourism economics (N = 33) with affiliation to Iran comprised the study sample. Twelve factors are determined based on the Delphi technique results. Accordingly, the main barriers include infrastructure, economic factors, social and cultural factors, and marketing. The findings demonstrate that economic factors and marketing are respectively the criteria with the uppermost and lowermost influences. Moreover, results confirm that lack of government investment in geotourism and lack of trained people to guide geotourism tourists are the highest and the lowest effective sub-criteria, respectively. Furthermore, performance sensitivity analysis based on the study objective indicates that Hormozgan Province has generally received a much higher score related to sustainable development barriers than other provinces according to the proposed criteria.