The Effect of New Media on the Tourism Strategies in Iran

Currently, the whole media capacities are not in use in the country in order to develop ‎the tourism strategies and approaches, and there is a considerable gap between the ‎media and tourism organizations that if not solved, the possibility of realizing the ‎programs and aims of the tourism industry will be hardly feasible. The aim of this ‎study was to investigate the effect of new media on the tourism strategies in Iran. The ‎research method was descriptive-survey, which tried to explain a model. In order to ‎collect data, a researcher-made questionnaire of new media function was used which ‎had 18 items with the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.77; and the researcher-made ‎questionnaire of tourism strategy was used, which had 18 items with the Cronbach’s ‎alpha of 0.72. In order to enhance the reliability and validity of the questionnaire, a ‎number of questionnaires were distributed among the experts and elites, and all the ‎uncertainties related to the questions were identified. Finally, after clarifying and fixing ‎ambiguities, the final questionnaire was provided and distributed. The statistical ‎population included the managers and experts of Tourism in Tehran and the statistical ‎sample was determined as 108 by using the snowball sampling method. LISREL ‎software was used to study the causal relations between the variables.  Findings ‎showed that there is a significant relationship between realizing the main functions of ‎the new media and the development of tourism strategies. Furthermore, the results ‎indicated that the new media in tourism section could not perform their functions very ‎well‎‎.