Planning for Sustainable Development of Tourism in the Tatra National Park Buffer Zone Using the MCDA Approach

Abstract

This study aims to develop practice guidelines for the preparation of local regulations promoting sustainable tourism planning for the area located at the entrance to the Tatra National Park, Poland. Included in the study was a set of tourism activities put forward by the local community. These activities were divided into two priorities: sustainable tourist activities (hiking and walking, cycling, horseback riding) and investments that would have an environmental impact (downhill skiing, recreational infrastructure, commerce, catering). The analysis criteria covered the tourist attractiveness of the area and its suitability for a given activity (benefit), as well as requirements concerning the protection of nature, topographical relief, landscape, and traditional land use (cost). These criteria were evaluated using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and summarized using the Weighted Linear Combination (WLC). The results showed the high attractiveness of the area for both priorities. However, due to the area's unique nature, investments having an environmental impact must be limited to the vicinity of the existing built-up areas. The use of MCDA supports decision-making at the local scale, significantly enhances the transparency of the results, and facilitates communication with local communities. The comparison with the current local law provisions showed the shortcomings of the methods used to date when preparing planning instruments.

Scientometric Analysis of Hiking Tourism and Its Relevance for Wellbeing and Knowledge Management

“…All regions experienced a significant rebound in January 2022, although it should be noted that this compares with low levels recorded in early 2021 [ 23 ], Europe (+199%) and the Americas (+97%) continue to show the best results, with international arrivals still at half of pre-pandemic levels. The Middle East (+89%) and Africa (+51%) also recorded an increase in January 2022 compared with 2021 [ 24 ], but these regions experienced a decline of 63% and 69%, respectively, compared with 2019.…”

Nature-Based Tourism in National and Natural Parks in Europe: A Systematic Review

“…A few articles that have potential management implications for the sustainable development of parks and other protected areas focused on understanding tourists' willingness to pay for visitation fees [126,131,133]. Some authors attempted to develop guidelines for sustainable tourism planning [34,38]. As discussed earlier in the present review, nature can be viewed not only as the context for touristic activities but as a product itself.…”

Multicriteria Decision Making in Sustainable Tourism and Low-Carbon Tourism Research

“…Half of the articles in this category use a GIS spatial approach to determine location, frequently combined with other MCDM methods. Such combinations include, for instance, AHP (Acharya et al, 2022;Adamczyk & Wałdykowski, 2022;Chaudhary et al, 2022;Jeong & Ramírez-Gómez, 2017;Rezvani et al, 2022), which also underpins the SDSS above (Beedasy & Whyatt, 1999), followed by ANP Aminu et al, 2014) and ANP-based SDSS (Aminu et al, 2017;Della Spina & Giorno, 2021), PROMETHEE (Oppio & Bottero, 2018), EVAMIX (Crecente et al, 2012), and Information value method (IVI) (Dey et al, 2018). On the other hand, the other ten articles partially used methods without combining them with a spatial approach.…”