Explaining the Impact of Social Security and Mental Image of Destinations on the Attractiveness of Urban Tourism Destinations (Case study: Tehran metropolis)

 Social security and, accordingly, the mental image of tourist destinations is one of the main conditions of every tourist destination, which is definitely checked by tourists prior to traveling and then decide where to travel. The present study was conducted with the aim of investigating the impact of social security and the image tourists of destinations on the attractiveness of urban tourism destinations.

 The present research is of applied type in terms of purpose and is of descriptive-analytical type in terms of method. Data collection was done via library and field approach. The statistical population of the study consisted of incoming tourists to Tehran, but due to the lack of accurate statistics on the number of incoming tourists, in order to determine the sample size, Cochran's formula was used for the unlimited population and the sample size was estimated to be 384 people. The tool for data collection was a researcher-made questionnaire, whose reliability was checked and confirmed by compound reliability and Cronbach's alpha, and validity by two methods, face validity and divergent validity. SPSS and Amos were used to analyze the data.

 The research findings showed that social security has a positive and significant impact on tourists' mental image of tourist destinations, as well as the attractiveness of tourist destinations. Given the value of the obtained path coefficient, the variable of social security projects 33.6% of the variance of the mental image of destinations, and 39.6% of the variance of the attractiveness of tourist destinations. Other findings of the research pointed to the positive and significant impact of the mental image of tourist destinations on the attractiveness of tourist destinations. It might be argued that the mental image of tourist destinations could explain 23% of the variance of the attractiveness variable of tourist destinations.