Evaluation of "The Tourism Festival Plan in Historic Center of Tehran 2012" based on the Integrated Quality Management of Urban Tourist Destinations Model

Tourism is not a new subject for human being’s thoughts. It is approved that human beings has had a trend to explore unknowns and new places since long times ago. However, tourists have diverse objectives to travel all around the worlds nowadays. For instance, they want to have fun, to visit different observations, to pray in holly places, and etc. These changes have led to different kinds of tourism trends. One of these kinds of tourism is Urban Tourism. Different cities, with a diversity in cultures, people and climates call tourists to visit them. This fact has made lots of travelers to visit cities and influenced the cities deeply. Therefore, urban managers consider urban tourism as a priority.
Tourism can improve the situation of cities regarding to its influence on urban economy, entrepreneurship, cultural diversity in urban spaces, social relations, social capital and other aspects of urban development. Despite these advantages, tourism may have negative impacts on cities and urban spaces. Tourism may change traditional relations, customs and cultural values. It may also deteriorate the environment and it may also deconstruct urban facilities. So it is important to have a suitable approach for urban tourism.
Tourism is a fragile, perishable, extremely diversified and fragmented product.
Therefore, to achieve tourism goals, it is necessary to pursue an integrated approach that considers all profits and responsibilities of tourism actors. In Iran, there are different economic sections who play role in urban tourism, for example the national government, as an organization, entitled the organization of cultural heritages, tourism and handcrafts, which has to define the main policies in national level. The municipalities, who have more financial and human resources provide the needed urban services, and NGOs and privet parties guide tours for tourists. It is very important to define a comprehensive framework for the cooperation of these sections. The model of Integrated Quality Management of urban tourism can help us for this purpose.
In the beginning of each year (in Persian calendar on 21 March to 1 Feb.), Lots of tourists visit Tehran, the capital of Iran. There are also tourist festivals at this time. The aim of this research is to evaluate the " Tehran tourism festival plan 2012" based on Integrated Quality Management of urban tourist destinations and suggest some ideas to improve its quality. Integrated Quality Management approach of urban tourist destinations has been developed in response to the need of comprehensive development of the quality of tourism destinations and in recognition of the fact that planning for tourists should be based on a holistic approach. The approach of Integrated Quality Management in tourism destinations is focused on tourist satisfaction, as well as following the development of the local economy and improvement of the quality of life of local communities and the environments. For a tourist destination, Integrated Quality Management can be considered as a systematic attempt to improve the internal and external quality.
The Integrated Quality Management Model contains five sections of identifying partners, decision for action, attempt, measuring the impacts and evaluation and set-up.
The main idea in each of the five sections is dynamics. This idea is because of the fact that in a cycle of continuous evaluation of these sections there are changes and reforms in order to enhancing the sector. As an important note, it should be considered that there is a horizontal integration at each of these stages as well as a vertical integration between these steps. These integrations prevent from scattering and dispersion between different levels of analysis, from the first section as identifying partners to the last one which is to evaluate the results, and so this framework can provide an integrated model.
For this purpose, using descriptive- analytical methods, efforts have been made to study the library sources and documents in theoretical framework and analytical model of this research, and to use inventory of tourists and interview with the executive manager of this festival for explaining and evaluating the plan. The main result of this research shows that to fill the gap between plans of planers and executive manager demands, we may have a steering committee to provide a basis of participation and partnership with all stakeholders, tourist planners, staffs, executive manager and tourist guides before and after the implementation of the tourist plan to set strategic directions, vision, objectives and actions which are based on analysis of existing conditions, evaluation results of previous tourism plans. At the end, this committee suggests the corrective actions in procedures according to feedbacks for future years.