PRIORITIZING SUSTAINABLE STRATEGIES FOR WORLD HERITAGE SITE APPLYING COMBINATION OF SWOT and AHP METHOD(THE CASE OF Sheikh Safi al-Din Khānegāh and Shrine Ensemble)

Sustainable planning is the main process to accomplish sustainable development and it is one of the significant programs which every organization implement it in order to have successful planning. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the critical factors in strategic planning of cultural attractions. Sheikh Safi al-Din Khānegāh and Shrine Ensemble a tourism site located in Iran Ardabil province is selected as the study area. In this study, the lack of determination of the importance ranking for the SWOT factors, we proposed to enhance SWOT analysis with multi-criteria decision making technique called Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Expert Choice 11 was used to achieve pair-wise comparisons among factors or criteria in order to prioritize them using the eigen value calculation. The aim of applying the combined method is to improve the quantitative side of strategic planning. Research findings reveal that this site mostly noticeable in terms of external threats and internal strengths therefore, competitive strategies were chosen to be implemented in the site. Results can be reviewed by local authorities and used in the tourism planning of similar study areas.

Keywords:

Tourism Strategic Planning , cultural attraction , AHP-SWOT method , Sheikh Safi al-Din Khānegāh and Shrine Ensemble