Identification and Prioritization of the Tourism Industry's Target Markets Using Multi Attribute Decision Making Approach in a Fuzzy Environment

Since today tourism plays a very important role in the communities'' economic system development and therefore different countries compete to attract the international tourists، so marketing and specifically issue of selecting target market are important. Purpose of this study is identifying the most important factors affecting on Iran''s tourism industry target markets and prioritizes these target markets. In this study a fuzzy decision-making approach that includes fuzzy hierarchy analysis process (FAHP) and a similar approach to fuzzy ideal (FTOPSIS) was used to prioritize target markets. Also the tourism experts were used to identify and compare influencing factors on chooses of target market. The results showed that used developmental analysis method in FAHP may lead to wrong decisions. Hence in this study Wang and Chen method was used for calculate the indexes weight in fuzzy FAHP. The final results of study illustrated that China places in the first and the Netherlands is in the end of target markets.