ASSESMENT OF THE DESTINATION IN TERMS OF TOURISM WITH IMPORTANCE-SATISFACTION MODEL: AN IMPLEMENTATION IN EDREMIT

The major objective of the research is to determine the crucial elements that thelocal tourists attribute importance to in their decision processes regarding theirholidays such as facilities, location and resources of the destination and thetourism services that are provided, while asserting how much they are satisfiedin terms of these elements regarding the Edremit destination. As the initial stepof the research, the literature was browsed in order to understand the elementsthat the tourists take into consideration while making a decision on their holidayand their satisfaction levels. The survey obtained in the related literature wasused to gauge the importance and satisfaction levels of the tourists. Then thedata acquired were analyzed with descriptive statistics and were interpreted bymaking a distribution on the model developed by Yang (2003a). Both similaritiesand differences were detected in some elements of the survey, according to thelocal tourists’ importance and satisfaction. Also some significant insufficienciesin some elements were defined regarding Edremit. If the destination managersand stakeholders take the results of the importance-satisfaction analysis, thenthe performance of the destination in terms of tourist satisfaction wouldincrease. It is obvious that these findings shall be tested and updated with otherresearches in the coming period.