Tourism Services Standardization in Iran-Comparison , Challanges and Suggestions

Anosheh Rahmani¹ Hadi Balouei Jamkhaneh² Behjat Ebrahimzadeh³ Noorollah Eslami Chalandar⁴ Amir Shahin⁵

1) Head of Faculty of Quality Management Systems and Inspection, Standard Research Institute, Tehran, Iran-
2) Member of Faculty of Quality Management Systems and Inspection, Standard Research Institute, Tehran, Iran
3) Member of Faculty of Quality Management Systems and Inspection, Standard Research Institute, Tehran, Iran
4) Member of Faculty of Quality Management Systems and Inspection, Standard Research Institute, Tehran, Iran
5) Member of Faculty of Quality Management Systems and Inspection, Standard Research Institute, Tehran, Iran

IOI Code : XYAA-ZBDAH
Publication : 2nd International conference on sustainable development, strategies and challenges With a focus on Agriculture, Natural Resources, Environment and Tourism(2icsda.ir)
Abstract :
    Tourism with high power in revenue making, employment, and culture creating, is a suitable option for development of many developing countries especially the ones with a weak economical situation. Iran is a developing country which its unique attractions and tourist destinations has created a lot of talent for benefiting from tourism industry. Using the current opportunities in tourism industry, like any other activity, needs implementation of principled policies and plannig, based on scientific researches and management. Based on the Iranian National Vision, the tourism industry has to atrtact 20 million tourists by the end of the seventh development program (year 2025). One of the responsibilities of the government is defining the standards and regulation of tourism industry. For this purpose, in this paper, tourism services,has been identified firstly by studying the literature and past researches in this area and then by using the experts ideas in the tourism area. Then, sections and contents of the standards of reputable organizations such as ISO, ANSI, and BSI in the standardization of tourism services, has been studied and compared with developed standards in this field in Iran. The findings depict that the tourism services in Iran could be categorized into nine main categories named: Hotels; Restaurants; Travel agencies and tour holdings; Tour leading and marketing services; Visiting sights and places of interest, promenades, shopping centers and souvenir sellers; Transportation services in tourism; Accomodation services for passengers and tourists; Tourism services; and other services; and all of them have 47 sub-categories. In studying the available national and international standards in the categories of tourism services, there exists 21 national and 48 international standards. Finally, by comparing the national and international standards, the available opportunities for standardization in the main categories and sub-categories of tourism services were analyzed.

Keywords : tourism industry tourism services services standardization opportunities for improvement