Abstract:

Culture and tourism have a mutually beneficial relationship. Thanks to this relationship, the attractiveness and competitiveness of tourism regions and countries are increasing. While culture has become an important component of the tourism product that creates privileges in an increasingly crowded global market, tourism is an important means of improving culture and generating income for the promotion and strengthening of cultural heritage, cultural production and creativity. For this reason, building a strong relationship between tourism and culture and managing this relationship can help destinations to be sustainable, to be more attractive and competitive. Although cultural attractions are a major source of motivation for tourists, a relatively limited number of studies have focused on quantification of the significance level of cultural attractions within the tourism product. The purpose of this study is to examine the place of cultural attractiveness in a tourism product that is a compound product in terms of destination competitiveness and to present a method that can be used to quantify the significance of cultural attractiveness in tourism product. In this context, the relative weights (importance order) of the basic tourism product components are calculated by using the entropy weighting method. According to this, the relative importance levels of the basic tourism product dimensions in terms of competitiveness are as follows: Cultural Attractiveness 39%, Natural Attractiveness 22%, Tourism Services Infrastructure 12%, Transportation Facilities 11%, Prices 10%, Image 5%.

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