Do inhabitants’ perceptions support tourism sustainability? The case of Khorramabad in Iran

Abstract

The present study attempted to examine the impact of inhabitants’ perceptions and local community participation on supporting sustainable tourism development. The goal of the current study was to determine how local community involvement and local views affected the development of a sustainable tourism industry. Inhabitants’ positive/negative perceptions and local community participation had direct but differential effects on supporting sustainable tourism development. Findings revealed that positive perceptions of residents affected their support for tourism development at twice the rate than their negative perceptions did, which indicated their higher readiness for participating in the tourism development process. Moreover, findings showed that using 16 latent variables to form a structural model and a path analysis method was good enough in terms of covering the research questions and analyzing the dataset.