The evaluation of sustainable tourism policymaking: a comparison between multicriteria and multi-objective optimisation techniques

Tourism-related activities are deemed to have a negative impact on the natural environment, thus requiring a proper management scheme. The implementation of planning procedures for sustainable tourism activities needs to be based on the active involvement of several actors, with conflicting goals and interests. In addition, the need for resource rationalisation is more and more pressing. Thus, this research aims to propose a procedure for selecting tourism activities to be funded by the Public administration and implemented. The proposed approach supports policymakers by providing suggestions on how to optimise the allocation of public resources, while accounting for social and environmental issues. This optimisation model has been applied to the selection of projects presented in response to a call for tender drafted by an Italian Public administration. The main aim of the tender is to finance projects aimed at either increasing the attractiveness of urban areas, seasonally adjusting tourism activity supply and supporting environment-friendly models. Our findings illustrate the operational advantages of the proposed approach, in terms of either improved resource allocation, increased interaction among public and private subjects and an increased number of funded activities. Furthermore, to validate our assumption, a comparison with a traditional multicriteria technique is performed.