Identifying and modeling creative tourism challenges in the city of Nain

Abstract

Today, creative tourism is one of the most important ways to improve the economic status of cities, but despite the benefits of developing this model of tourism, its implementation is not easy and there are numerous challenges to its realization. In this context, the city of Nain is one of the urban areas that, despite benefiting from various forms of tourism and allocating a share of the city's economy to this activity, faces challenges in various dimensions in order to realize creative tourism. Therefore, the present study aims to identify and model the challenges of creative tourism and remove obstacles to the realization of creative tourism. The spatial domain of the research is the city of Nain. The type of research is applied in terms of purpose and descriptive-analytical in terms of method. The statistical population of the research consists of two levels, including officials, city managers and city tourism activists, and academic experts and specialists. The sampling method is purposeful and the sample size for the first group, based on theoretical saturation, is 17 people in the form of semi-structured interviews and for the second group, 10 people were selected in the form of a questionnaire. Data analysis was also conducted through thematic analysis and ISM. The findings of this study show that, among the nine main challenges identified, the most important challenge is the lack of creative and convergent management, which results in the inability of executive managers to actualize the city's existing capacities and capabilities in the field of tourism. Therefore, identifying competent managers, holding training courses in problem-solving skills, decision-making, negotiation techniques, creativity and teamwork, and preparing cultural and environmental attachments are necessary to prevent the identified challenges in the field of creative tourism in Nain.