Geographic Information Systems in the Service of Alternative Tourism – Methods with Landscape Evaluation and Target Group Preference Weighting

Abstract

There is a large variety of types of rural areas and many of them are rich in landscape beauty. However, their preserved culture and traditions are revalued in today's rapid transformation of lifestyles. Alternative tourism is thus an emerging potential to economically support these areas, at the same time helps to preserve natural and cultural heritage. The methods provide sophisticated means to analyse the characteristics and the potential attractiveness of landscape and cultural attractions from the viewpoint of alternative tourism development. Homogenous tourism sub-regions can be defined, and the most suitable development scenarios can be found to the certain areas.

The analysis of the tourism plan within a cross-border development strategy: Sustainability of the regional tourism product plan of the Hungary-Croatia (IPA) Cross-border Co-operation Programme 2007-2013

“…Several thematic articles have been published in the scope of projects (Mobile Region, Co-Op, RTPP) financed within the HU-HR (IPA) CBC Programme or other EU funded Programmes. The topics of those papers relate to the border area, especially in the array of labour mobility and tourism, among which one was published about the RTPP and the methods applied in its elaboration (Varjú, et al, 2013).…”

“…Out of 52 cross-border, 13 transnational and four interregional/networking programmes, as well as 10 IPA and 12 ENPI programmes in the period 2007-2013 there was no similar methodology9 applied in relation to tourism development, consequently the HU-HR (IPA) CBC Programme was considered to be a The RTPP had to be elaborated so that tourism actions 1.2.2 to 1.2.5 (Figure 2) could be interconnected with its content. The RTPP was developed in the period between March 2010 and March 2011, as an extensive document with more than 600 pages creating a joint tourism strategy and a basis for all HU-HR tourism projects (Varjú, et al, 2013). The Handbook to Tourism Projects summarised the most important RTPP findings and it was published in September 2011 in an applicant friendly way on the official website11 of the Programme.…”

Main characteristics of Hungarian-Croatian political relations and cross-border co-operations

“…Nevertheless, successful co-operation targeting water management and environmental protection was realised mainly in the framework of crossborder projects. The most successful among these is undoubtedly the Mura-Drava-Danube Cross-border UNESCO Biosphere Reserve extending to the area of five countries jointly initiated by Croatia and Hungary in 2009, and formally realised on 12 July, 2012(Varjú, et al, 2014. The role of cultural and educational institutions is fundamental in the practical achievement of these objectives.…”

Using a VGI and GIS-Based Multicriteria Approach for Assessing the Potential of Rural Tourism in Extremadura (Spain)

“…The assessment of RTP was aimed not only to quantify this potential in the form of an intensity map, but also to analyze the weakness and strength of each county in terms of each evaluating factor (level 1) and criterion (level 3). In this context, following [24,26,53], thematic maps relating to each evaluation factor were first created by using an open-source desktop GIS, QGIS. Second, to quantify the RTP, an intensity map was created based on Equation (4).…”

“…Analytical hierarchical process (AHP) methodology has been used together with geographic information systems (GIS) tools in several research studies that have, in common, the territory as the physical framework: land use and general suitability analysis [21][22][23][24], natural resources management [25,26] suitable location of engineering projects [27], and urban and regional planning [28][29][30][31][32][33]. Although this methodological approach is considered as a new and powerful research tool, the difficulty and complexity of the methodology can produce inaccurate results if it does not consider the specificity of the tourism sector.…”