Prioritizing Influential Factors on Tourist Decision-Making for Choosing Destinations Using Parsimonious Analytical Hierarchy Process (PAHP)

ABSTRACT

The increasing number of touristic attractions and destinations within urban environments has led to an escalation in the complexity of decision-making processes for visitors. This study provides insights to assist the tourists’ decision-making for choosing destinations by considering realistic criteria. The objective of current research is to prioritize the following criteria: travel time, travel cost, privacy, weather, rating, accessibility, security, safety, environmental effects, and health effects. An empirical study on touristic destinations in Budapest city with two main scenarios was conducted, where Parsimonious Analytical Hierarchy Process (PAHP), a recently Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) developed approach, is applied. The results show that the security criterion has the highest priority with a final weight of 0.567, while the lowest influential criterion is privacy with a weight of 0.051. The findings attempt to assist tourists in decision-making and planning with correspondence between the characteristics of touristic destinations and trip circumstances.

KEYWORDS:

• MCDM
• AHP
• PAHP
• tourism
• prioritization
• decision-making

Acknowledgements

The linguistic revision of current paper is prepared by Eszter Tóth.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the János Bolyai Research Fellowship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (BO/00090/21/6).