Identifying and Prioritizing Cultural Barriers to Community-Based Tourism in Iran

Community-based tourism is an approach to achieving sustainable tourism that focuses on community productivity. Being productive in the context of a society in the field of community-based tourism requires active participation, which is greatly influenced by the cultural atmosphere of the society. For this purpose, the present study has identified and prioritized the cultural challenges of tourism stakeholder participation in Iran. Initially, nine major challenges were extracted based on domestic and foreign literature and localized and prioritized using the SWARA method based on the integration of the opinions of seven tourism, urban, and academic affairs experts. Structural relationships between challenges were performed using interpretive structural modeling, in which challenges were balanced at five levels. The DEMATEL method was used to confirm the results. According to the findings of the present study, among the cultural challenges of community-based tourism, the inefficiency of mass media and lack of sense of belonging had the most impact and lack of trust and limited interactions, ambiguity, and indifference of individuals had the most interaction with other challenges, respectively.