A Two-Stage MCDM Model for Exploring the Influential Relationships of Sustainable Sports Tourism Criteria in Taichung City

Many countries advocate sports for all to cultivate people’s interest in sports. In cities, cross-industry alliances between sports and tourism are one of the common practices. The following two important issues need to be discussed, namely, what factors should be paid attention to in the development of sports tourism, and what are the mutual influential relationships among these factors. This study proposes a novel two-stage multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) model to incorporate the concept of sustainable development into sports tourism. First, the Bayesian best–worst method (Bayesian BWM) is used to screen out important criteria. Bayesian BWM solves the problem of expert opinion integration of conventional BWM. It is based on the statistical probability to estimate the optimal group criteria weights. Secondly, the rough decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (rough DEMATEL) technique is used to map out complex influential relationships. The introduction of DEMATEL from the rough set theory has better practicality. In the calculation program, interval types are used to replace crisp values in order to retain more expert information. A city in central Taiwan was used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the model. The results show that the quality of urban security, government marketing, business sponsorship and mass transit planning are the most important criteria. In addition, in conjunction with local festivals is the most influential factor for the overall evaluation system.