Optimization Techniques in Engineering

20Determining Key Influential Factors of Rural Tourism—An AHP Model

Puspalata Mahaptra¹, RamaKrishna Bandaru¹, Deepanjan Nanda² and Sushanta Tripathy^2*

¹School of Commerce and Economics, KIIT deemed University, Bhubaneshwar, Odisha, India

²School of Mechanical Engineering, KIIT deemed University, Bhubaneshwar, Odisha, India

Abstract

The Indian tourism industry has emerged as one of the engines of the country growth. Travel and tourism sector have been contributing around 10% to the Indian GDP. The Indian government has been putting lot of efforts to enhance the revenue from the tourism sector. In order to promote the country as a 365-day tourist destination, the ministry proposed the Niche tourism products development scheme. Under the niche tourism products, wellness, adventure, cruise, adventure, medical, golf, polo, meeting incentives conferences & exhibition, film tourism, ecotourism, sustainable tourism, and rural tourism were identified by the Indian Tourism Department. Therefore, the present study focused on rural tourism and aimed to identify the key factors in order to push up the rural tourism as India has almost 68% rural villages. Further, subfactors of the top 3 main factors also ranked to know more contributing subfactors by allotting both local and global weights toward the success of rural tourism. The study identified nine factors with 33 subfactors and ranked the nine factors using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model. The primary data has collected from ...