The selection was made by the Travel Services Center at the ICHHTO headquarter in Tehran.
Cities were selected in four categories, including metropolises, provincial capitals (excluding metropolises), cities with a population of over and those with a population of less than 100,000, ISNA reported.
Isfahan and Mashhad were selected as top metropolises, while Sari in Mazandaran Province and Khoramabad in Lorestan Province were chosen as top provincial capitals. Neishabour in Khorasan Razavi Province and Marivan in Kurdestan Province were voted top cities with over 100,000 people and Ramsar won the top prize under the city with fewer than 100,000 people category.
Honorable mentions include Shiraz and Tabriz among metropolises, Ilam and Sanandaj among provincial capitals, Maragheh and Abadan among cities with over 100,000 people and Baneh among cities with fewer than 100,000 people.
The top cities will be honored in early May, according to Morteza Rahmani Movahed, the tourism deputy at the ICHHTO.
We wanted to show that efforts of local authorities to provide quality services to tourists during the Norouz (Iranian New Year) holiday have not gone unnoticed, he said, adding that the cities will benefit from their approval as top destinations.
The chosen cities will receive loans from the relevant organizations to develop infrastructure and improve services.
Proper management of tourism and recreational activities, promotion of cultural and artistic programs, tourist satisfaction, and quality of travel services and tourism facilities are a handful of criteria considered when deciding the best performers.
The awards, which were held for the first time in Iran, will help create a sense of competition that lead to improved quality of services plus better collaboration among the related organizations, Movahed said.
By Financial Tribune
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