Conceptualizing sustainable–responsible tourism indicators: an interpretive structural modeling approach

Despite decades of debate and theoretical and practical activity related to the sustainability of tourism, its implementation remains difficult. The tourism–environment relationship, shaped by some concerns about natural and social environments, creates the concept of sustainable tourism and forms other concepts such as responsible tourism. The main debate related to sustainable tourism as a concept and responsible tourism as its successful implementation is how a responsible behavior is related to sustainability. The present study aimed to answer the question by offering the idea of sustainable–responsible tourism and find an approach for using sustainable tourism through responsible tourism. In the qualitative and exploratory research, the systematic literature review was used to design the sustainable–responsible tourism model and was given a structure through interpretive structural modeling. The results indicated that sustainable tourism cannot be related to tourism destination sustainability without considering responsible tourism. In fact, the sustainable tourism efforts will not yield a good result without paying attention to the details and responsible behavior of tourists and tourism industry activists. Conceptualizing sustainable–responsible tourism using structuring methods is considered as the theoretical contribution of the research.