Iran including attractive places and high potential for tourism (external and internal) and investing on tourism industry including social and economic effects leading to constancy of tourism areas. Unfortunately, despite high capacity of developing tourism in our country, this capacity has not recognized well and has not utilized for development of Iran. The special factors influence on transi...

Many research studies suggest that a substantial percentage of tourists seek cultural experiences, such as visiting cultural attractions and participating in diverse cultural activities that are not ‘sun, sand and sea’ related. The World Tourism Organization suggests that more than 40% of all international tourists are ‘cultural tourists’ (Richards, 1996). The Travel Industry Association of Ame...

Heritage is an important part of the international tourism market. As with any resource, sustainable management practices are required to maintain the long-term value of heritage assets. It is claimed that sustainable heritage tourism provides quality experiences for the tourists while protecting the environment and improving the quality of life for local residents. Yet, irrespective of how tou...

So far little attention has been paid to the territorial aspects of cultural heritage, dispersion patterns and clustering processes nor to the changes induced by tourism on the physical, economic and social environment. Studying the territorial cohesion of different elements of cultural heritage and the interdependency between tangible and intangible heritage assets brings us closer to an under...

UNESCO world heritage sites’ list is getting longer and longer. Many sites among them have attracted countless tourists each year. However, the lack of efficient systematic surveillance and monitoring methods let the evitable and inevitable impacts of tourism development happen unperceived. Our research focuses on an e-tourism system with heritage sites monitoring to explore the possibilities f...

Despite great efforts in adopting technologies for tourism development, few results have been achieved. A lot of experiences are mostly based on pilot projects or on never completed prototypes. Nations with a large tourism vocation lack of a serious national tourism portal. A different approach has been adopted in Matera (southern Italy), where a volunteered way has been adopted in mapping all ...

Tourism has emerged as one of the world’s largest industries and a fast growing economic sector. The Asian region attracts a growing number of quality-conscious tourists as it is endowed with a rich biocultural/heritage diversity. However, the diversity and integrity of many Asian tourist destinations have been severely eroded or irreversibly damaged due to ill-conceived, poorly planned, and un...

Can tourism be the catalyst for urban preservation while permitting the continuation of urban culture? Only if local distinctiveness, rather than preserved monuments, is what attracts tourists to an historic region, argues Orba̧sli. The author advocates preservation through a planning-management approach. This approach avoids façadism (i.e., preservation of the physical elements only), and inste...

In the first part of the study we introduce fuzzy sets that correspond to comparative indicators for measuring sustainable development of tourism. In the second part of the study it is shown, on the base of model created, how one can determine the value of sustainable tourism development in protected areas based on the following established groups of indicators: to assess the economic status, t...