A Fuzzy Multicriteria Spatial Decision Support System for Tourism Pressure Management Under Data Scarcity in the Kingdom of Bahrain

Destination managers need to know where tourism activity concentrates, how well those places absorb shocks, and which management actions can be trusted, yet most destinations lack spatially detailed visitor data. This study introduces and evaluates an open-data spatial decision support system, demonstrated for Bahrain. Thirteen open datasets, analysed on a 500 m grid and re-evaluated at 250 m and 1 km, inform an agglomeration index, a vulnerability index, three disruption scenarios, and a multicriteria ranking of 729 intervention portfolios, with robustness checks at each stage and fuzzy representation retained only where it adds decision-relevant information. The agglomeration index is consistent across specifications and scales but reflects urban form rather than visitor demand: it correlates weakly with recorded visitation (Spearman ρ = 0.32), whereas tourism points alone correlate more strongly (ρ = 0.57). Vulnerability concentrates in a band around the urban core rather than in the core itself. Two interventions, visitor redistribution and temporal balancing, are selected in every robustness test under the adopted weights; under the stated scenario intensities, they reduce pressure by 41.5%, sufficient for a demand surge only with access management added and insufficient for a corridor closure or a compound event. The procedure and the validation framework are transferable to other data-scarce destinations; the parameter values are context-specific and require local recalibration.