Examination of the sustainable rural tourism potential of the Brčko District of Bosnia and Herzegovina using a fuzzy approach based on group decision making

Abstract

Tourism is an economic activity with great contribution for the development of many countries. To develop rural areas, tourism is especially important and need to be improved in these areas. The Government of Brčko District of Bosnia and Herzegovina has decided to have tourism improvement as one of main objectives in their development strategy focusing on better conditions for development of tourism. Investments in tourism should be applied to the entire area of the Brčko District. Since Brčko District mainly consists of rural areas, it is necessary to invest in rural tourism. The first step of this study was to determine the tourist potential of rural areas. The determination of rural tourist potential in Brčko District was carried out with the assistance of the Brčko District Government. For this purpose, the method of expert decision-making was used, and three experts were selected who evaluated six rural settlements. To obtain results based on expert evaluation, two multi-criteria methods were used: the Full Consistency Method (FUCOM) for determining the importance of criteria and the fuzzy Measurement Alternatives and Ranking according to the COmpromise Solution (MARCOS) method to rank rural settlements in terms of their tourism potential. The results showed that the settlement of Bijela has the best rural tourist potential, while the settlement of Grbavica has the least potential. The results obtained by applying this model showed how rural tourism in Brčko District can be improved. The research model for testing the tourism potential has shown good results and can be applied in other branches of tourism with some adaptation to certain branches of tourism.