Identifying and Prioritizing Development Steps of Cultural Tourism in Lorestan Province Rural Areas

This study sought to identify and prioritize the development steps of cultural tourism in rural areas of Lorestan province using the qualitative-quantitative method and exploratory approach. To this end, at the first stage, 19 semi-structured interviews were conducted with cultural tourism experts to identify the steps involved in cultural tourism development, out of which thirty-three solutions were identified in four main steps via open, axial, and selective coding. At the second stage, the Delphi-Fuzzy technique was applied in two stages to reach a consensus among the experts and prioritize cultural tourism development steps through the defuzzification process. The results showed that the identified strategies for cultural tourism development in Lorestan province could be categorized into four main steps: "Education and Innovation," "Physical Infrastructure," "Supportive-Institutional," and "Cultural-Advertising." Moreover, since the defuzzificated mean difference of the experts' opinion was less than 0.25 in two steps, all the identified solutions were proved to be valid. The results also indicated that the first and foremost step in tourism development was "education and innovation," followed by physical infrastructure, supportive-institutional, and cultural-promotional steps, respectively. Furthermore, at each step, the most important solutions were found to be advertising for tourism villages, identifying villages with tourism potentials, providing banking facilities for villagers to help them develop tourism, and building cultural elements and particular architectures in rural areas, respectively.