Prioritizing Sustainability Dimensions in Locally Focused Tourism: An Advanced Ranking Approach

Locally focused tourism (LFT) promotes sustainable development by prioritizing local community empowerment through local engagement, preservation of cultural traditions, and equitable economic participation. However, aligning these local development goals with the interests of tourism investors and authorities is still a significant challenge. The current study addresses this gap by ranking four key sustainability pillars, namely, economic, environmental, social, and cultural sustainability with a hybrid soft computing approach combining fuzzy sets and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), that is, fuzzy AHP. Findings reveal environmental sustainability as the highest priority, followed by economic, cultural, and social dimensions. An intelligent information system was developed to find these rankings, serving as a decision-support tool for both policymakers and tourism administrators. The framework balances both the investment priorities and LFT values, by offering a path toward long-term, environmentally responsible, and culturally sensitive tourism planning, and is achieved by systematically prioritizing sustainability dimensions through expert-driven soft computing modeling, which ensures environmental and community-centric factors are not dominated by purely economic interests, while still acknowledging investment viability.