A Study of the Barriers to Iran's Tourism Industry Development

Today, tourism is considered as one of the largest and most diversified industries in the world. Although Iran stands the 10th place in terms of tourism potentials, it has failed to attract enough tourists. Consequently, it suffers from a low status related to tourism even among the Middle East countries. This study aims to examine the reasons behind Iran' failure to attract tourists. To this end, tourism experts and professors as well as senior managers were consulted. 103 subjects were selected randomly, using simple stratified sampling. Then, a 42-item questionnaire was administered to the participants and exploratory factorial analysis was run. The factors derived included: 1-infrsatructure, 2- political 3-cultural 4-govrnemntal (public) 5-human 6-managerial 7-economical. Finally, the research hypotheses were tested using t-test. The results show that all the seven hypotheses are confirmed, with inadequate infrastructure as the biggest barrier, followed by political and cultural barriers.