Systematic analysis of development in Iran’s tourism market in the form of future study: A new method of strategic planning

•Future study is vital for developing tourism and attracting international tourists.•Modern methods of future study are needed in addressing national and regional issues.•The study provided a new and strategic approach based on future study.•This can be useful in tourism planning to attract tourists to a destination.•MICMAC and Scenario Wizard constitute the two main phases of the study. Future study is vital now more than ever for countries to develop tourism and attract international tourists. The main purpose of this development is to gain benefits, especially economic ones. Modern methods of future study, especially scenario building, are helpful in addressing issues at the national and regional scale because of their flexible strategies. According to the applied nature of the study, data were collected in two ways: reviewing previous studies and using questionnaires. The questionnaires were in the form of a cross-impact matrix and were self-administrated. The data were analyzed using MICMAC analysis and Scenario Wizard software. The results of the MICMAC method indicated that 10 variables have key/predominant roles in terms of influence in the development system of Iran’s tourism market. In the second phase of the study, 34 possible states of the key variables were defined. The results of the Scenario-Wizard method indicated that four scenarios have strong consistencies, and among those only one is a driver that has ideal and desirable characteristics and conditions for implementation.