Identification and prioritization of the tourism industry's target markets using Multi Attribute Decision Making Approach in a fuzzy environment

Abstract

Tourism plays a very important role in the communities’ economic system development and therefore different countries compete to attract the international tourists, so marketing and specifically the issue of selecting target market are important. This study aims to identify the most important factors affecting Iran's tourism industry target markets and prioritize these target markets. In this study, a fuzzy decision-making approach that includes fuzzy hierarchy analysis process (FAHP) and a similar approach to fuzzy ideal (FTOPSIS) was used to prioritize target markets. Also, the tourism experts identified and compared the influential factors on choices of target market. The results showed that using developmental analysis method in FAHP may lead to wrong decisions. Hence, in this study Wang and Chen method was used to calculate the indexes weight in fuzzy FAHP. The final results of study illustrated that China ranks first and Netherlands ranks last in the target markets.

Keywords

• Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP)
• multi attribute decision making (MADM)
• target market
• Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (FTOPSIS)
• tourism marketing