An Investigation of the Role of Tourism in Rural Areas (Case study: Dehestan Lavasan)

The general goal of this paper is to examine the effects of tourism on rural development areas and present suitable strategies to reach development in these regions and finally adopt an optimum developing pattern. In order to get to the designed goal, the field work and library study were done. It should be mentioned that after preparing field works were done to get aquatinted with the regions situation and inspecting the capability of target region in absorbing tourist. Generally, two kinds of questionnaires for common people and officials were prepared. The result from SWOT analysis indicated that in rural area inspected for case study, there are 9 strength elements in front of 11 interior weakness points and opportunity as advantages and 20 weakness points and threat as limitation of the case study rural area is very high and needs to reconsideration and presentation of adequate policies to remove the weakness and threat by taking advantage of strength points and opportunities. The result from the analysis indicate that from the view point environmental attractions, the ecological attractions of the study region has ``the priority in development of tourism which was advised to put emphasize on it for expansion of natural tourism and ecotourism.