Explaining Socio-cultural Factors Affecting Creative Tourism From the Tourists’ Perspective: A Case Study of Zayandehrood Visitors

Creative tourism is a type of emerging cultural tourism that focuses on skill development. Accordingly, cultural heritage, rituals, and handicrafts can be presented in such a way as to provide more interactions between visitors and the local population. In this regard, due to successive droughts in Isfahan city and thus the decreasing number of visiting tourists, it appears necessary to develop creative sociocultural tourism in the city, especially with regard to the Zayandehrood site. Therefore, this study sought to identify and prioritize socio-cultural factors involved in creative tourism from the perspective of the tourists who visited Zayandehrood using a descriptive-analytic and survey-based method. To this end, confirmatory factor analysis was used to analyze the collected data using the Amos software. The results indicated that among socio-cultural factors, it was the cultural ones that had the priority in creative tourism of Zayandehrood. Therefore, it could be argued that introducing the indigenous culture of the Zayandehrood area will be effective in attracting tourists even during the drought. Finally, Zayandehrood-based creative cultural tourism strategies were developed using the QSPM matrix, according to which "creating an atmosphere and organizing events based on the cultural capacities of Isfahan with an emphasis on Zayandehrood" turned out to be the prioritized strategy, with its score being 10.48.