Tourism Destinations Network Analysis, Social Network Analysis Approach

The tourism industry is becoming one of the world''s largest economical sources، and is expected to become the world''s first industry by 2020. Previous studies have focused on several aspects of this industry including sociology، geography، tourism management and development، but have paid less attention to analytical and quantitative approaches. This study introduces some network analysis techniques and measures aiming at studying the structural characteristics of tourism networks. More specifically، it presents a methodology to analyze tourism destinations network. We apply the methodology to analyze mazandaran’s Tourism destination network، one of the most famous tourism areas of Iran.