Abstract:
Tourism has a serious impact on the economic and social life of most countries and Turkey is among them with its growing tourism industry. However, foreign demand strictly depends on political and economic events and the industry is usually faced with serious repercussions. This research aims to determine the attributes of star-hotels and holiday villages which are important in the choice decision of Turkish customers in order to find out ways to attract domestic demand. In this way, these institutions might be less affected from occurring events. The research covers a literature review of prior studies about different aspects of the tourism sector. Under these highlights, a questionnaire was designed and the data collected by personal interviews from a quota sample of 200 respondents in eight randomly selected hotels and holiday villages situated in istanbul and Antalya. From the conclusions of the study, it is seen that people generally prefer to go on holiday near the sea in summer. They primarily take information from friends for hotel selection, showing the effect of word-of-mouth on the hotel industry. About the hotel choice criteria, service quality appears to be the most important attribute for customers next, the presence of a health center followed by the job experience of personnel are ranked at the top of all other hotel attributes covered in this research. These are the requirements of customers that managers should certainly provide in their hotels or holiday villages in order to have a significant share in the tourism market. Additionally, a clear preference of reasonable price against quality is found on the customers' side. However, as income level rises, tendency towards requiring high quality increases. Thus, managers should offer primarily a reasonable price and then high quality to reach more customer groups.
