Building sustainable tourism hierarchical framework: Coordinated triple bottom line approach in linguistic preferences

The study aims to develop a hierarchical framework for sustainable tourism considering socio-economic, socio-environmental and eco-efficiency aspects (coordinated triple bottom line). However, development of this hierarchical framework development must consider linguistic preferences and the interrelationships between the aspects and the criteria. Hence, the vague set is used to address linguistic preferences, and the interrelationships are presented with the decision-making and trial evaluation laboratory technique. Interpretive structural modeling is used to develop the sustainable tourism hierarchical framework. The results reveal that (1) socio-economics has a greater influence and (2) eco-efficiency performance does not reach the expected level because tourism firms encounter conflicts in balancing economic growth and environmental impact. This proposed hierarchical framework aims to guide the tourism industry toward sustainability. This study also proposes rewarding employees for promoting eco-processes, creating new eco-commercial links with the public and adopting an eco-organization to increase competitiveness and profitability for the practitioners. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.