Prioritizing Yazd City's Tourist Attractions from the Perspective of Asian and European Tourists

Although Yazd has a variety of cultural and natural attractions, but the importance of each of these from the perspective of foreign tourists is not entirely clear. The aim of this study is to identify and classify tourist attractions in Yazd and prioritizing them from the perspective of experts and Asian and European tourists. To realize the objectives, first with the help of desk research, tourist attractions in Yazd were divided into two main categories and sub-categories, then in order to prioritize the main tourist attractions from the perspective of experts, fuzzy EHP technique was used. Also to prioritize sub-categories of each of the main attractions from the perspective of Asian and European tourists by the survey, a questionnaire was designed. Sample size of this study consists of 111 Asian tourists and 103 European tourists who had traveled to Yazd in 2014. To prioritize the views of European and Asian tourists, VIKOR fuzzy technique was used. The results showed that tourism experts in Yazd, has divided the main tourist attractions in order of preference to the five main categories (1. Cultural attractions / man-made created with a purpose other than to attract tourists, 2. Intangible cultural attractions, 3. Cultural attractions / man-made created with the primary purpose of attracting tourists, 4. Natural attractions 5. Events) with 15 sub-categories. Accordingly attractions' prioritization was investigated from the perspective of Asian and European tourists and no significant difference was observed.