Identification of Personality Characteristics of Guilan Province as a Tourism Destination Using Qualitative Content Analysis Method

Tourists' perception of the personality characteristics of a destination is one of the most important factors that influence their choice of destination. But despite the importance of this issue, identifying the personality traits of the country's tourism destinations and creating a unique identity for them has rarely been the focus of tourism studies. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to identify the most important personality traits of Guilan province as one of the most popular tourism destinations in the country, using qualitative research and content analysis method. In the first part, through conducting semi-structured interviews with 11 experts in the fields of tourism and marketing and analyzing the content of interview data and encoding them, 55 personality traits were identified and then 65 personality traits from the most researches done for tourism purposes were also added to these. After removing duplicates or unrelated, the list consisting of 102 personality traits was set. Then in the second part of the study, this comprehensive collection of personality traits was provided to another group of tourism, marketing, and psychology experts to select the closest personality traits to describe the province. At this point, those features that earned score 4 and above remained on the list and the rest of the list was removed. At the end of this stage, 16 personality traits remained in the list for describing the Guilan province as a tourist destination, classified according to the similarities and relationships between these features, in three dimensions: unique, warm, and stylish.