Analysis of Relationship Marketing Barriers and Restrictions in Tourism Industry Using Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making Techniques

Increasing competition forced many industries, especially tourism industry to adopt new marketing paradigm, “relationship marketing”. In this environment, tourism industries have been forced to change their reaction to market. Therefore, it is not unexpected, when implementing the relationship marketing programs, that they may face many barriers. In this paper, we try to survey barriers of relationship marketing in tourism industry. The study is applied target wise, and to collect required data, interviews with experts and questionnaires were employed. Using fuzzy TOPSIS and based on comments received from experts of tourism industry, the main barriers of marketing i.e. individual, organizational, managerial, motivational and structural factors were ranked. The results showed that motivational barriers were the most important and organizational, individual, structural, and managerial barriers were ranked as less important respectively. Finally, the components of each of the barriers were ranked as well.