Determining priority infrastructure provision for supporting agrotourism development using AHP method

Abstract

Agrotourism is a tourism activity using agro-business since beginning to end agriculture products in any system, scale and form as tourism object, with aims to widening knowledge, traveling, recreation, and business relationship in agriculture. Infrastructure divided into hard infrastructures (such as transportation, irrigation, drainage, electric network, clean water piping, communication network, sewerage, and waste management); and soft infrastructures (such as government policy, finance, and insurance services, information and communication services, education services, health services, and travel service). This research aim is to show how to use AHP as a tool to make a decision determining priority infrastructure provision, in the preference to support agrotourism development. This research takes Karo Regency, North Sumatera, Indonesia as a case study that has agrotourism attraction spread almost at 17 subdistricts. This research also uses AHP (analytical hierarchy process) for decision making with comprehensive characteristics, to handle complicated problems, multi-attribute, qualitative and quantitative scope. As research results, a decision with preference to get the biggest benefit value in short time for local government, and for Karo Regency peoples, is getting priority provision to start by hard infrastructure in the form of clean water supply first, then providing soft infrastructure in the form of government policy.