Tourism Development Policies in Iran and Turkey: A Comparative Approach With Special References to Socio-cultural Interactions Relationship between Guests and Hosts

This study was carried out with the aim of allocating relevant factors for such effective socio-cultural interactions relationship between guests and hosts to find out the importance of them. Result shows that the most important factors of this study are importance of an appropriate social interactions relationship between hosts and guests, act respectfully to the host culture to avoid cultural clashes, informing tourist about culture and tradition of host community, hospitality and the appropriate welcoming, the satisfaction of tourist from cultural exchanges, festivals and special events, the tourists satisfaction from police behavior and the opportunity to have cultural contact.
Undoubtedly, the role of tourism in economic development, enhances community well-being and reduces regional disparities through its own mechanisms including employment opportunities, relevance redistribution of economic resources, such as tourists spent money, increase of economic leakage and multiplier effect rate, are so for some of developing countries is important which some of scholars such as Britton, Turner and De Kadt have considered it as relevance developing scenario, and even like a passport for them. Hence producing appropriate socio-cultural conspectus between host and guest communities in terms of social and economic growth and development of them is an undeniable necessity.
Tourism can positively influence the live standards of residents increasing their income, creating new job opportunities, improving the local infrastructure, increasing the availability of entertainment facilities, promoting the local identity, etc; however tourism has also the potential of creating negative impacts by increasing the cost of living and micro-crimes, exacerbating overcrowding and traffic congestion, altering the ecosystem.
Considering Iran’s economy circumstance and its essential need to making employment opportunities on the one hand, and also Turkey’s relatively successful experience in the tourism developing and planning on the other hand, are main purposes of the present research. The comparative study of Iran and Turkey’s tourism polices, investigation and analyses of the social interaction between host and guest and its impact on tourism development in these countries are main objectives and frames.
In order to achieve the aims of this study, documentary and field work survey have conducted and based on scholar s’ opinion, eight important and effective factors were designed as criterion investigation of the interaction between host and guest. It is asked from both Iran and Turkey’s inbound tourists through questionnaire, and then it is run SPSS and Excel as two major statistical software and also statistical tests (Student's t-test, ANOVA, Chi-Square Test) for comparing them.
Discussion and The results of the present study shows that institutionalization of relevance and rational conceptual framework of tourism industry and it’s positive, various and long-term effect on host communities, to provide proper image from host communities and local residents to tourists before and after the process of travel for understanding the social and cultural components and reducing the possible conflicts, enhance socio-cultural hospitality capacities in the communities through proper trainings among them, Infrastructure to participation of residents in the process of tourism development, using the potential of the local culture (native) to increase the attractiveness of tourism destinations, to take into consideration the effective approaches such as creating various web sites and multilingual TV channels, releasing the high amount of information about destinations and attractions features, making independent tourism ministry contracts with major tour operators and wholesalers specially from Europe and north America, conducting special cultural events and international festivals, were the reasons of Turkey’s successful experience in the realm of tourism. The results of this research reveal that despite of Iran’s privileged position in the global tourism map, Iran do have very slightly contribution in the world tourism marketing which mainly is caused of (due to) various socio-cultural challenges.
This study was carried out with the aim of allocating relevant factors for such effective socio-cultural interactions relationship between guests and hosts to find out the importance of them. Result shows that the most important factors of this study are importance of an appropriate social interactions relationship between hosts and guests, act respectfully to the host culture to avoid cultural clashes, informing tourist about culture and tradition of host community, hospitality and the appropriate welcoming, the satisfaction of tourist from cultural exchanges, festivals and special events, the tourists satisfaction from police behavior and the opportunity to have cultural contact.
Iran as one of the most attractive destinations of the region, with taking appropriate policies and targeted development of tourism and with (by) considering to experiences of other countries like Turkey that has various social and economic commonalities with Iran would be able to advance towards one of the important and immemorial economic and cultural dreams that have had since long time ago, given that, most of successful global businesses have admitted that tourism is convenient and reliable resource to start this way.