1 Evaluating the Sustainability of Tourism Development in Kish Island

Sustainable tourism is a recent concept used to reflect the need for a comprehensive analysis and management of tourism both as business and experience. Tourism is actually one part of the efforts to achieve overall sustainable development. Sustainable development is environmentally nondestructive, technically proportionate, economically dynamic and socially acceptable from the viewpoint of people. Now, that sustainable development is one of the objectives of this era of tourism industry, evaluating its performance and effects in tourism destinations is essential. This paper aims at selecting and implementing an appropriate model to evaluate sustainable tourism development in Kish Island in south of Iran. To this end, KO`s conceptual model of sustainable tourism development evaluation has been adopted. This model has been developed via a goal-oriented procedure based on holistic as well as detailed approaches. In order to apply KOs` model, the following steps have been taken in a goal-oriented process: identifying and determining the tourism development systems in Kish Island; identifying the dimensions and indicators; selecting the scale of sustainability; determining the gradation of sustainability; and finally extending the evaluation maps (BTS & ATSI) of sustainable tourism of Kish Island. In order to follow this procedure, questionnaire has used to gather data on three principle elements of sustainable tourism development (tourists, host community and environment experts). Then, the results of the data analysis were shown on the BTS based on the five-point scale of sustainability. The results indicate Intermediate level of sustainability for the present status of tourism development in Kish Island. It was also observed that the sustainability level of human system is higher than that of the natural system. ATSI model was also applied as a supplement to BTS analysis in order to determine the individual sustainability levels of sustainable indicators of Kish Island. Thus, the index of noise achieved the highest sustainability level, denoting calmness of the island; and the index of performing environmental monitoring got the lowest level of sustainability comparing to other indicators of sustainable tourism development of Kish Island.