Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) of Factors Affecting Food Tourism Development (Case Study: Rasht City)

Nowadays, food tourism has become a type of tourism that many countries have recognized it as one of the sources of tourist attraction. Rasht city has a significant position in terms of food diversity rather than other cities. So that's the only city in Iran that has joined the UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network for gastronomy in 2015. This study is applied and Descriptive survey type in terms of objective and data collection, respectively. The tool is the binary comparison questionnaire, and the main objective of this study is exploration of the most important factors affecting food tourism development in Rasht. The first step in this research is to identify some factors affecting development of local foods tourism and in the next step, the relations between food tourism development factors are determined and analyzed using Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM). In the modeling section, pairwise comparisons questionnaire is employed in order to use the viewpoints of 20 experts in the field of tourism and finally, by using MICMAC analysis, the types of variables were specified. The results of this study show that the most important factors affecting the development of food tourism in Rasht are respectively preparing healthy food and observing sanitation and health principles during the various stages of preparing and serving it as well as having food authenticity which is in the lowest level. One of the main suggestions for attracting tourists is to pay attention to preparing healthy food and observing sanitation during different stages of its serving as well as to improving the quality of local foods and to creating a variety of flavors.