A spatial decision support system for guiding the selection of tourism development sites

Tourism site selection decisions are of significant importance because they generally entail a large commitment of resources and strongly influence an organization's future well-being. The main objective of this study was to develop a method for enhancing the quality of tourism site selection decisions. The study proposed a spatial decision support system framework which integrates the strengths of geographic information systems (GIS) and a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) method. The integration of GIS and MCDM into a coherent system provides users with greater utility.; The system was designed in such a way that it can (1) provide capabilities to handle both the spatial and multicriteria aspects of selections; (2) guide decision makers by offering a systematic, analytic and comprehensive approach; (3) be helpful in organizing and structuring the decision; (4) help decision makers to consider and process all information relevant to the task without requiring excessive cognitive demands from them; and (5) be easy to use.; Personal interviews were conducted with twelve experts in order to identify the major evaluation criteria used in selecting tourism sites. A survey was then employed to determine the relative importance of the 18 criteria which emerged from the interviews. Questionnaires were completed by 60 individuals who were directly involved in tourism development projects. The respondents consisted of 34 individuals from the private sector and 26 from the public sector. Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), the relative importance of the criteria was calculated based on pairwise comparisons. Results indicated that there was a substantial difference between respondents from the private and public sectors on the relative importance of evaluation criteria. Developers identified legal and financial criteria as being of primary importance, while public sector respondents emphasized environmental concerns.; Application of the system to a real world site selection problem demonstrated its usability and potential as an effective decision support tool in complex tourism site selection problems.