Tourism industry is one of the most important low carbon industries and it can provide good opportunities for developing countries to take advantage of their natural attractions such as historical monuments, culture, etc. to create value added. However, there are always some barriers in front of developing this industry and a good strategy could help it develop faster. There are different methods for strategic planning and SWOT matrix is one of the most popular one. In this paper, we present an empirical survey to find the most important and strategic items for developing tourism industry in Iran. The proposed study designed a questionnaire and distributed it among 384 tourists who were visiting Iran in a three months period of year 2011. The information gathered were analyzed using factor analysis and structural equation modeling. There are seven important factors involved in developing tourism industry. The first factor, price and having sufficient infrastructures, is the most important factor according to our survey representing 14.623 percents of the changes. The second factor is associated with political and international affairs, which represents 13.926 percents of the changes. The third factor is associated with culture and civilization attractiveness representing 9.342 percent of changes on tourism. The fourth factor is natural attractiveness representing 6.691 percent of the changes. The fifth factor is related to economical factor representing 5.632, the sixth factor, human resources, represents 5.353 percent of the changes and finally the last factor is related to diversity of creatures, which represents 4.749. These factors include 60.3 percent of the success of tourism.

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