محمدعلی علی خلیلی

Today, the tourism industry is regarded as the most inclusive service industry worldwide that serves as a substantial source of economic prosperity (job creation, foreign exchange earnings, poverty mitigation, etc.) and elevated exchanges and social interaction. For this, areas with a high potential in tourism should take proper strategies to hold the economic and socio-cultural benefits of this industry. Free trade zones in Iran, particularly Kish, Qeshm, and Chabahar, can primarily consider the tourism industry and attract tourists to achieve economic goals, as declared in the law governs the establishment of free zones and also in the economic, social and cultural program of the country. Herein, this work attempts to identify appropriate strategies for tourism development in Qeshm Free Trade Zone to develop the tourism industry and economic-cultural sectors. For this, the strengths and weaknesses (internal factors) and opportunities and threats (foreign factors) were identified using the SWOT technique and the opinions of experts and specialists. The multi-criteria decision model ANP (an analytic network process) was used to prioritize and rank internal and external factors and determine the ultimate value of a collection of internal and external factors, aiming to prioritize and adopt the best strategy in the form of SO, WO, ST, and WT solutions. And the final value of each of these solutions was respectively 0.28, 0.39, 0.23, and 0.49. Initial results indicated the supremacy of the offensive strategy with the highest value (0.49) that is considered as the predominant strategy. The foremost strengths and opportunities in the region include investment in the private sector, security for tourists, the distribution and variety of tourist attraction sources, and the participation of indigenous people in the Qeshm region.