Sustainable tourism: a group parsimonious analytic hierarchy approach

Purpose Tourism is one of the levers of a country's economy. Policy makers pay particular attention to defining tourism strategies aimed at encouraging sustainable tourism in internal and peripheral areas. Our work aims to provide an adequate multi-criteria decision–making (MCDM) methodology to address group problems in the tourism sector. Design/methodology/approach We propose a new version of the Parsimonious Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method for group choices, proposing a methodological innovation that integrates an algebraic approach for the construction of Pairwise Comparison Matrices into the Parsimonious AHP. This approach removes some drawbacks of the classical Parsimonious AHP without increasing the evaluation time or the cognitive effort required of the decision-maker (DM). The work analyses a real case study involving the DMs of six municipal administrations located in the hinterland of Campania in relation to a national project that encourages tourism to increase territorial attractiveness. Findings The results obtained demonstrate that the new methodological approach provides concrete support for the definition of tourism strategies shared by the various DMs involved. The application of sensitivity analysis in our study has confirmed the robustness of our results. Originality/value The paper is original in respect of both its method and its applications. Indeed, for the first time, we propose a methodology that integrates an algebraic approach based on Abelian linearly ordered groups into the Parsimonious AHP method, and then we apply this methodology in support of the development of tourism strategies that integrate sustainability-oriented decision criteria and promote sustainable tourism in internal and peripheral areas, foster the enhancement of the cultural and territorial heritage, and strengthen inter-municipal cooperation. In the future, our methodology could be applied to other decision-making problems in other domains of interest, and further methods that use pairwise comparisons, in addition to Parsimonious AHP, could be integrated with the algebraic approach used in this paper.