Key Success Factors of Crowdsourcing in in Developing Tourism Destination Capabilities: A Case Study of Yazd City

Today, information technology has made it possible to solicit the views of different people with diverse perspectives and ideological backgrounds. Being one of the benefits of IT, crowdsourcing could, as an easy-to-use public opinion survey tool, be used as a very useful instrument wherever social participation may facilitates the identification and resolution of problems. Having carefully reviewed previous studies of the field, we found that few attempts have so far been made to induce tourists to socially participate in identifying the opportunities for the development of civilian, cultural, and social infrastructures of tourist destinations. As one of the Iranian cultural and historical tourist destinations, Yazd city has recently been enlisted in UNESCO World Heritage sites and has attracted the attention of many tourists worldwide. Having said that, it appears that its tourism capacities and infrastructures need to be developed. This study, therefore, sought to identify the criteria which could be effective in the success of tourist crowdsourcing in offering appropriate solutions for the development of tourism in Yazd. To this end, the primary criteria for the successful implementation of crowdsourcing were extracted from the relevant literature, from which 25 criteria in six general categories were screened and identified via Delphi method. To rank the criteria mentioned, the opinions of Yazd tourism experts were collected through paired comparisons, being analyzed and ranked by fuzzy network analysis. The finding of the study indicated that human resources and cultural indices with the weights of 0.28 and 0.21 respectively were the most important factors in the success of tourist crowdsourcing.