A Strategic Approach to Sustainable Tourism Development Using the A’WOT Hybrid Method: A Case Study of Zonguldak, Turkey

Abstract

Nowadays, tourism-led economic growth has become a major outcome of the public policy. Researchers have recently begun to address the development of tourism from a perspective that is based on economic, cultural, social, and environmental sustainability. This paper aims at presenting a strategic approach that can help to develop sustainable tourism at touristic destinations. In order to pursue our aim, the A’WOT (AHP-SWOT) hybrid method, developed in combination with SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis and the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) method, was used. SWOT analysis was used to determine the significant strategic factors, and the AHP method was applied to prioritize these factors. The province of Zonguldak, located in Northwest Turkey, was chosen as the research area to suggest tourism strategies that can be sustainable by means of the application of the A’WOT method. Proposed strategies for the research area are related to product diversification and event management, the image of the destination, a sustainable visitor management system, promotion and branding strategies, partnerships, and cooperation. The results illustrate that the dependent economic structure may be broken down with the development of the tourism industry and, therefore, that some strategic initiatives are required to achieve sustainable tourism in the province.

Green Marketing Orientation and Environmental and Social Performance of Hospitality Firms in South Africa

“…Based on this gap in the literature, the aim of the study is to examine the relationship between GMO and environmental and social performance of the firm in the context of the hospitality sector. This study is significant as the tourism industry is slowly changing priorities from pure economic considerations to a sustainable tourism marketing model (Aimagambetov, et al, 2017;Kisi, 2019). This study will make an empirical contribution to the literature on the nexus between GMO and environmental and social performance in the context of the hospitality industry.…”

Agritourism-A Sustainable Development Factor for Improving the ‘Health’ of Rural Settlements. Case Study Apuseni Mountains Area

“…Most European countries, and beyond, have to see rural development as a chance to fight poverty, to ensure the sustainability [1,2] of the rural environment, so each industry is encouraged to find a solution for sustainability in its own field [3]. Sustainability puts its accent on values and principles, which have as their main purpose to guide actions, in a responsible and harmonious way, taking into consideration the environmental and societal consequences, as well as economic purposes [4].…”

“…As mentioned, the notion "sustainable" is used in various fields, agritourism being one, so sustainability has become one of the most important strategic issues for many rural areas. [3] Most studies have shown that tourism combined with rural resources and traditional products would be an important "tool" for revitalizing rural, mountainous areas [16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Modern patterns of rural development highlight that a rational and planned exploitation of agricultural resources together with the valorization of cultural and naturalistic heritage of rural areas, or simply said, the right leverage to assure sustainable growth of rural settlements, are through agritourism [23].…”

An Application of the A’WOT Analysis for the Management of Cultural Heritage Assets: The Case of the Historical Farmhouses in the Aglié Castle (Turin)

“…Starting from the seminal works by [28,29], a significant strand of literature developed and the number of its applications to real-world decision problems increased significantly [32][33][34]. The applications of the A'WOT method are varied and cover as major fields natural resource management [32,[35][36][37], sustainable tourism and tourism management [25,34,38,39], strategic assessment and group decision making (see among others, [40][41][42][43]). Although in the field of cultural heritage assessment, there are a flourishing set of recent contributions in literature on the sole application of AHP [44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51] and SWOT analysis [52][53][54][55][56], respectively.…”