The Delphi research method has been used over the last
30 years as a technique systematically combining expert knowledge
and opinion to arrive at an informed group consensus on
complicated issues (Donohoe & Needham, 2009). It is traditionally
used as a useful forecasting tool with a closely adaptive approach
that has the benefits of being able to generate opinions and move
toward a consensus on complex problems such as policy decisions
(Miller, 2001; Tsaur, Lin, & Lin, 2006). The AHP (Saaty, 1980), in use
for at least thirty years in multiple-criteria decision-making, is
popular in tourism planning and tourism destination choice as
a common application for performance evaluation because of its
three primary functions, structuring complexity, measurement on
a ratio scale, and synthesis, which make the AHP suitable for a wide
range of applications (Hsu, Tsai, & Wu, 2009). AHP facilitates an
approach to understanding decision factors and their relative
weight and is useful when used to evaluate decision-makers’
expressed preferences or opinions (Park & Yoon, 2011), thereby
allowing users to structure complex problems in the form of
a hierarchy and effectively handle both qualitative and quantitative
data.