Identifying tourism development priorities in the east of Semnan province (Combined application of focal group and hierarchical logic)

Sustainable tourism development planning based on the existing potentials in any region of the country is an obvious necessity. Considering the adoption of a government development approach to Semnan province in recent years, this province can be considered as a good case to study. The east of the province, despite its high potential for tourism development as well as its geographical area, has received less attention. The purpose of this study is to identify the most important sustainable tourism projects in the east of Semnan province. For this purpose, applied, descriptive (non-experimental) and combined (qualitative-quantitative) research can be pursued. First, a focus group (qualitative method) consisting of 12 experts including officials, university professors and local people was used to identify the projects. After that, 30 output projects were ranked according to the degree of compliance with the criteria of sustainable development and the goals defined in the upstream documents using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) (quantitative method). According to the ranking, training the local people of the region, providing the necessary infrastructure in the sample areas and target villages, and determining appropriate marketing methods and preparing an advertising plan for tourism development in the region are of priority.