Multi Criteria Decision Making Approach for Evaluating Tourism Destinations in Turkey

Tourism is the world’s one of fastest growing industry and the largest service sector industry. It is also considered as one of the biggest industry in Turkish economy. Choosing a travel destination is a kind of multi-criteria decision making problem. Relative importance of factors across locations play a crucial role for ranking the destinations. There are several attributes in evaluating competitiveness, including natural resources, transportation, accommodation, blue flagged beaches, cultural resources, reputation, image, popularity, safety, security, health and hygiene, price, quality of cuisine, night life and variety of activities and recreation etc. This study comprised of 13 destination alternatives in four cities (Antalya, Aydın, İzmir, Muğla). These destination alternatives are Alanya, Bodrum, Çeşme, Datça, Didim, Fethiye, Kaş, Kemer, Kumluca, Kuşadası, Marmaris, Manavgat and Serik. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) are multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methodologies. They have been used extensively for analyzing complex decision problems. These approaches can be used to help decision-makers for prioritizing alternatives and determining the optimal alternative. In analyzing the data, AHP and TOPSIS methodologies are used for the outranking of some of the well known tourism destinations in Turkey. The "safety and security", "health and hygiene" and "price" are determined as the three most important criteria in the supplier selection process by AHP. Based on TOPSIS analysis the top three of the alternatives in descending order are Alanya, Marmaris and Bodrum. Proposed model results indicate that Alanya is the best alternative with RC value of 0.473. Conference: XIVth International Symposium on Econometrics, Operations Research and Statistics Sarajevo/Bosnia and Herzegovina, May 24‐28, 2013