Abstract:

Branding of tourism destinations is inevitable in global competitiveness. One of the most important components of creating brand is destination personality. Marketing experts can develop more effective international positioning strategies by creating destination personalities pertain to tourism regions. Through destination personality, competitive capacity of destination can be improved by increasing preferability against other destinations. The overall goal of this study is to list and compare the destination personalities of Turkey and Greece identified by Turkish people. In line with the aim of this study, Turkish tourists local living in Istanbul aged 18 or above are defined as universe and travel agencies in Istanbul has been used for collecting data on the basis of the assumption that Turkish tourists living in Istanbul may visit travel agencies due to various reasons getting information, purchasing product/service etc . 708 surveys which could be used for the research have been obtained by convenience sampling method and analyzed. The identified destination personality in Turkey provides results in competencesophistication, sincerity and ruggedness terms while destination personality in Greece is for sophistication-excitement, sincerity and ruggedness terms. Differences emerged in the first factors related to destination personalities for both countries. Personality attributes about competence stands out in the first factor for Turkey while for Greece personality attributes about excitement outstands

Keywords: