Abstract:

The mass tourism understanding created by "sea-sand-sun" tourism, which is accepted as 3S in the tourism industry recently, it is seen that has been replaced by alternative tourism opportunities that offer various activities and different experiences. In this context, it is possible to state that "cultural heritage tourism" activities shaped within the framework of activities focused on "culture" are one of the prominent alternative tourism opportunities in terms of destinations. From this point of view, in this study, it was aimed to evaluate the tourism potential of the cities that are included in the UNESCO World Heritage List and therefore have cultural heritage tourism opportunities. While performing this evaluation, CRITIC and MAIRCA, which are among the Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods, were used. First of all, criteria were weighted using CRITIC, which is an objective MCDM method. In the study where eight criteria were used, the most important criteria were found to be the number of beds, the number of hotels and the number of museums, respectively. Cities were ranked by MAIRCA method by using criterion weights obtained by CRITIC method. In terms of tourism potential, the most successful cities were İstanbul, Muğla, İzmir, Bursa and Aydın, and the most unsuccessful cities were Karabük, Sivas, Kars, Çorum and Adıyaman, respectively. Finally, sensitivity analysis was performed to test the consistency and accuracy of the MCDM methods used.

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