THE DETERMINANTS OF COMPETITION IN HOSTEL MANAGEMENT: ANALYSIS OF OPERATORS’ AND TOURISTS’ OPINIONS

EXTENDED ABSTRACT Young travelers are becoming an increasingly important market for the tourism sector. According to the World Tourism Organization, in 2015, %23 of total international travel movement had occurred with the participation of young people between the ages of 15-29. The number of young tourists, estimated to be 196 million worldwide in 2010, reached to 304 million in 2017. Youth tourism has led to USD movement, and its economic return was about 286 billion dollars in 2014. Youth tourism is an important tourism type for almost all destinations and it provides many benefits such as taking more time to travel than other tourist categories, spreading this form of tourism throughout the year, being able to travel in times of crisis due to their flexible budgets, having low cost of infrastructure investments required for youth tourism, and being able to use the existing infrastructure more efficiently. Youth tourism is a market where cheap, dynamic, Internet-based solutions are an important tool of interaction between the producer and the consumer. There are different programs which attract young people to travel. Au-pair, training programs, volunteer programs, work and travel programs, cultural exchange, sports tourism and adventure tourism programs are among these. A significant number of young travelers prefer hostels as a type of accommodation in the countries they travel in. Youth hostels used to be associated with concepts like cheap and basic accommodation. However, the expansion of hosteling into new areas of the world and the growing demand for cheap accommodation options have changed the traditional face of hosteling. The increase in options (such as private rooms and bathrooms etc.) indicates that the service standards are improving in the hostels. In recent years, there has been a growth both in accommodation opportunities and service quality of these accommodations for young travelers in many cities all over the world. This trend is particularly marked in the center of major cities, where new youth accommodation chains, boutique hostels and student residences are springing up. Cities such as London, Berlin and Barcelona now have a wide range of youth travel accommodation options, many of which are being supplied by large companies like Generator and A&O. These new spaces are increasingly being used as meeting places by young people in the cities, not just by their clients, but also by other tourists and locals. For example, now there is a high degree of crossover between Couchsurfing and hostels, including some hostels acting like