tourism infrastructure

Leveling tourism destinations is used as an approach and strategy in order to decrease the misbalances of the area and region. In this manner, the present study is prioritizing tourism destinations infrastructure of Kermanshah province using the SAW and GIS technique. The infrastructures under study in this research includes tourism sample areas, transportation corporations, number of cinemas, theaters, fairs, Islamic holy places, gas stations, public inhabitants, transported passengers, travel agencies, and restaurants. For analyzing the related data related to the tourism infrastructures of Kermanshah province which are extracted from the annual statistics of the year 2013, the decision making technique of simple average weighting SAW in the software of excel and also in order to draw the map of spatial distribution of province’s tourism infrastructure the Arc GIS software was used. The results show that although the Kermanshah province has many touristic attractions but due to not-providing of equipment and required facilitations and imbalanced in distribution of tourism infrastructures, a massive difference exists in the manner of tourism infrastructure in the province. In a manner that the Kermanshah township as the center of the province has the most tourism infrastructure and solasbabajani has put the most enjoyable and the most deprived in the province.

Karbala city is destination of millions of pilgrims from all over the world every year. Therefore, this research has assessed strategies for developing religious tourism in Karbala city, with an emphasis on improving the pilgrims' experience and exploiting the economic and social capacities of this city. First, indicators related to religious tourism infrastructure were identified, and then their impact on the pilgrims' experience was analyzed using statistical methods. Data collection tool is a researcher-made questionnaire, which was used to examine its validity from the specialists and experts in quantitative and relative content validity coefficient, and to examine its reliability, was used Cronbach's alpha. The statistical sample includes two groups, 19 people in the qualitative section and 550 people in the quantitative section, selected using convenience sampling. Data analysis includes initial coding, classification, extraction of indicators and variables, descriptive and inferential statistics such as one sample t-test, analysis of variance, Pearson correlation, and linear regression. Results showed residence index with the maximum mean and minimum dispersion indicates the its importance and diversity for pilgrims. The recreational and commercial services index with the lowest mean showed less importance. Correlation results indicate a positive and significant relationship between the attraction index and other indicators at the 0.001 level, which shows that as tourist attractions are strengthened, other services and infrastructure are equally effective in improving the pilgrims' experience. Results of compare means between pilgrims and local residents showed in the catering service and residence indexes, mean of rank pilgrims (253.21 and 254.49) are higher than local residents (239.65 and 234.55) at a significance level of 0.398 and 0.215, respectively. As a result, improving tourism infrastructure, accessibility and improving the quality of recreational and medical services can lead to increased pilgrim satisfaction.