Elsevier

Tourism Management

Volume 33, Issue 2, April 2012, Pages 413-426
Tourism Management

Improving tourism policy implementation – The use of hybrid MCDM models

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2011.05.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Few studies have presented a holistic approach to evaluating complex national tourism policies, successfully quantified the dynamics at play, or proposed an improvement model. The corresponding purpose of this study is to address this problem, using the method of hybrid MCDM (multiple criteria decision-making) to examine the dependent relationships among various dimensions and criteria of tourism policies and, ultimately, to suggest an optimal improvement plan for Taiwan tourism policy. A decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) is employed to construct a network relationship map (NRM), which then is used to illustrate the influential network of the tourism policy improvement model. The DEMATEL-based analytic network process (DANP) and VIKOR are adopted to evaluate the weights and the gaps to the aspired level of implementation. The model is useful in identifying both an influential network and a priority sequence of dimensions/criteria related to tourism policies and, thus, is helpful to tourism policy management.

Highlights

► The research demonstrated a holistic approach, a hybrid MCDM models, for evaluating complex national tourism policies. ► The DEMATEL is employed to construct NRM to illustrate the influential network of the tourism policy improvement model. ► The DANP and VIKOR are adopted to evaluate the weights and the gaps to the aspired level of implementation. ► The models are helpful to tourism policy management.

Introduction

The travel and tourism industry is one of the largest industries in the world. The ascent of tourism to the position of the world’s largest industry has been rapid, and the growth of global travel continues to be robust (UNWTO, 2006, WTTC, 2005). Taiwan has not failed to recognise the important role of tourism, and in response, the government has rapidly developed its tourism policies to meet demand and produce related benefits. The Taiwan Tourism Bureau, the central administrative authority overseeing national tourism affairs and facilitating the development of the tourism industry, has launched a series of policies for tourism development. In the new millennium, these policies are presented in ‘Project Vanguard for Excellence in Tourism (2009–2012)’, the ‘Medium-term Plan for Construction of Major Tourist Sites (2008–2011)’, ‘Taiwan Easy Go’ and other similar materials (Tourism Bureau of Taiwan, 2010a, Tourism Bureau of Taiwan, 2010b).

Because tourism is a ‘mixed industry’ comprised of private firms, public agencies and not-for-profit associations (Andersson & Getz, 2009), a sustainable tourism industry requires a commitment by all parties involved in the planning process (Hall, 2000, Richins and Pearce, 2000). Governments turn to individual communities for commitment, attempting to achieve sustainable tourism and benefits from the industry. All of the policies are planned carefully, and they consider the human and environmental impacts of tourism (Lin, 2006, Theobald, 2004). Nevertheless, the rapid development of the tourism industry introduces several concerns: What are the influential dimensions of current tourism policies? What level have the current policies reached? What might be a more effective approach to improve these policies? The WTO (1980) has warned that many plans for tourism have been prepared at the national level but are rarely implemented as intended, often because they are too complex, financially impractical, or disconnected among the institutional arrangements of particular destinations. Moreover, such plans involve unrealistic expectations regarding coordination, cooperation, participation and political management (Hall, 2000, Yasarata et al., 2010).

In light of these debates, one assumption underpinning the present paper is that a tourism policy must take into account community commitment and a focus on the environment, examining the relationship between contextual aspects of the problem rather than only considering the techniques and methods involved in preparing a plan. Previous research on tourism planning/implementation has often overemphasised the process of developing such plans and neglected to consider the priority levels of the various policies and how to improve them (e.g., Farrell and Twining-Ward, 2004, Kuo, 2005, Pforr, 2005, Wray, 2009). In other instances, the research has considered these questions to be a pure matter of perception or highlighted them in broad strokes as part of a concluding argument (e.g., Chen, 2003, Lin, 2006, Wang, 2007, Yang, 2006). On this basis, this paper is intended to consider perceptions held by policymakers (both from governments and communities) as criteria, and these criteria can be managed individually (the criterion itself) and interdependently (criterion to criterion, criterion to other criteria). The aim was to develop a model that shows the network of relationships between the policy criteria and to propose a strategy for improving tourism policy implementation.

For this purpose, a hybrid MCDM model is proposed using expert groups. A decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) is used to detect complex relationships and to build a network relation map (NRM), including the criteria for tourism policy measurement and evaluation. Then, the DANP (DEMATEL-based ANP) approach can be used to calculate the influential weights of policy criteria to overcome problems of dependence and feedback among criteria and alternatives, according to the concept of ANP (analytic network of process) theory by Saaty (1996). Finally, VIKOR is used to evaluate the total performance of national tourism policy to discover the performance scores and gaps. To date, no published work has linked such a hybrid MCDM theory with relationship modelling improvement strategy in the context of tourism policy planning and management. This study attempts to bridge this gap, using an empirical case of an improvement plan for Taiwan’s tourism policy, and hopefully contributes to a complex national tourism policy system with a useful evaluation model based on a hybrid MCDM method.

The remainder of this paper is organised as follows: In Section 2, tourism policy implementation in Taiwan is reviewed. In Section 3, a hybrid MCDM model for a tourism policy implementation evaluation system is built. An empirical case of an improvement plan for Taiwan’s tourism policy is illustrated to show the usefulness of our proposed model in Section 4. Finally, conclusions are presented in Section 5.

Section snippets

Review of tourism policy implementation of Taiwan

Understanding the policy environment in which decision-making occurs is crucial to improving our understanding of the formulation and implementation of the tourism policy process (Hall, 1994). This Section reviews the background information on tourism policymaking and the approach to relevant policy implementation in Taiwan, thereby providing the conceptual framework for the research.

Building a hybrid MCDM model for a tourism policy implementation evaluation system

Tzeng and Huang (2011) indicate that Multiple Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) is a methodology that is able to consider multiple criteria at the same time and also helps the decision-maker to estimate the best case by sorting cases according to the characteristics or criteria (Tseng, 2009a, Tseng, 2009b) of each from limited available cases. The hybrid MCDM tools of analysis used in this research were the techniques of DEMATEL, DANP and VIKOR. First, DEMATEL was used to confirm the effect on

An empirical case: an improvement plan for Taiwan’s tourism policy

As stated, the aim of this paper is to determine perceptions regarding tourism in Taiwan by considering the input of the government and corporate and non-profit organisations engaged in tourism policy planning and management as associated with national tourism policy. Based on the comments made, this paper produces an optimal tourism policy improvement model based on hybrid MCDM (multiple criteria decision-making), shows the network relationships of the policy criteria and proposes a strategy

Conclusions

This research modelled the improvement strategy that should be pursued as part of tourism policy implementation in Taiwan. A novel hybrid MCDM method was used to address dependent relationships among the various criteria together with DEMATEL (as used to construct the NRM) and the DANP (as used to decide the relative weights of the criteria) and VIKOR (as used to determine the improvement priority). In this study, of the various tourism policy implementation evaluations, those provided by the

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