AN INTEGRATED AHP-BASED FRAMEWORK FOR PRIORITIZING DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGIES IN SUSTAINABLE TOURISM DESTINATIONS: EVIDENCE FROM AN EXPERT PANEL IN COLOMBIA
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Although digital marketing and sustainability have become central pillars of tourism destination management, the literature integrating these two domains to prioritize specific strategies remains limited, particularly studies employing multicriteria decision-making methods. This study proposes an integrated Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) framework to prioritize ten digital marketing strategies against four criteria: brand equity enhancement, sustainability communication and promotion, local stakeholder engagement, and impact on visit intention. Criteria and alternatives were derived from a PRISMA-informed structured literature review (39 studies) and a keyword co-occurrence analysis. Criterion weights were obtained from eleven experts working in Colombia (academia, public sector, NGO and private sector) through aggregated pairwise comparisons (geometric mean, CR = 0.049), and alternatives were scored using the AHP ratings approach. Visit intention (0.416) and brand equity (0.268) received the highest relative weights; social media marketing, integrated digital marketing communications, and digital destination branding emerged as the top-ranked strategies. Social media was ranked first in 93% of bootstrap resamples, whereas the exact order of the criteria was less stable. The study offers destination managers a replicable, evidence-based framework for allocating sustainable digital marketing investment.
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