Evaluation of the Sustainability of Tourism in Ihlara Valley and Suggestions

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the sustainability of tourism activities in Ihlara Valley and to develop suggestions for the area to have sustainable tourism. Whether the tourism activities in Ihlara Valley are sustainable or not was evaluated based on the sustainable tourism criteria proposed by Gebhard et al. These four main criteria include 18 sub-criteria and in the present study, 11 of these criteria were found to have low values, 6 of them have medium values and only 1 of them has a high value and particularly the values found for the sub-criteria involved in the main criterion of management and monitoring are low, which shows that the tourism activities in the region are not sustainable. In the second part of the study, suggestions were developed for tourism to be sustainable in Ihlara Valley by evaluating the protection status of the cultural landscape that is one of the important components of sustainable tourism, tourist satisfaction and development of the local community through analytic hierarchy process method.