A Fuzzy Approach to Urban Ecotourism Site Selection Based on an Integrated Promethee III Methodology

Abstract

Urban ecotourism is defined as the travel and exploration activities which take place in and around a city that provides visitors and residents with a greater appreciation and conservation of the cities' natural and cultural resources. Planning ecotourism activities in the urban context is a multidimensional task which requires consideration of environmental, social, and economic issues. The purpose of this study is to propose a fuzzy multicriteria approach for the selection of the most appropriate site(s) for promoting ecotourism activities in urban areas using a modified PROMETHEE methodology. In the suggested methodology, the importance weights of the evaluation criteria are determined by a fuzzy pair-wise comparisons procedure. The fuzzy sets theory is a good tool for dealing with subjective and implicit human judgments. PROMETHEE III outranking methodology is used to make a prioritization among seven different districts of Istanbul. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to test the robustness of the results.