Assessment and ranking of tourism in the provinces of Iran from the perspective of tourism development infrastructure

The tourism industry is one of the ten most influential industries in economic development in most countries. To this end, major research from various perspectives on this industry has been conducted and is ongoing at all international, national and regional levels. One of these areas of research that plays an important role in micro and macro policy making of decision makers is the issue of ranking different regions. In this research, the provinces of the country are ranked based on operational indicators. These indicators have been developed in this research by studying the samples of valid researches, interviews, field researches and valid national statistics of the country. The result of this identification was 18 operational and performance indicators whose information was accessible and validated in the country. It should be noted that in this study to develop tourism indicators, a wider range of well-known literature called tourism and travel (T&T) has been considered. After identifying the indicators that can be a valid reference for future research, the provinces are ranked by two multi-criteria decision-making tools, TOPSIS and Macbeth. These algorithms are developed in the MATLAB programming environment. Finally, the result of the two methods was that the algorithms confirm each other's ranking in more than 90% of cases. In addition, the provinces of Tehran, Mazandaran and Khorasan Razavi have the first to third places.