A Model for Ecotourism Development: The Case of Iran

This study uses a mixed research framework to propose a model of ecotourism development in Iran. In the qualitative part, practitioners and experts were interviewed to extract the elements of the model, and the data were analyzed through thematic analysis. Therefore, four dimensions and 19 were detected. In the quantitative part, the dimensions and strategies were arranged into a questionnaire and were ranked by Iranian tourism experts. The results of analysis through hesitant fuzzy sets method revealed that the most important ecotourism development dimensions in Iran were “Management,” “Infrastructure development,” “Marketing,” and “Training and developing human resources.” Also, the most critical ecotourism development strategies were “marketing activities for increasing market share in ecotourism,” “diversifying Iran’s ecotourism products,” “improving roads leading to target villages for tourism,” and “increasing resilience of destinations in the face of natural disasters”, respectively.