How To Make an Urban Destination Attractive for Visitors: Evidence from Istanbul.

Abstract

The efforts to diversify and extend the tourism season to 12 months continue unabated with new approaches and strategies. This issue is of greater importance for countries where tourism is pivotal to the growth of the economy. One approach to achieve this is through urban tourism and its popularity is increasing rapidly. Although tourism has a significant impact on the Turkish economy, the country is widely known for sea-sand-sun tourism. However, research on how this can be transformed into urban tourism especially from the perspective of cuisines is still needed. This current study focuses on the narratives of tourists visiting Istanbul, Turkey's mega-city as well as an important urban destination. A qualitative research approach is adopted, and a document analysis technique is employed in the study. Tripadvisor user entries, commonly used in scientific research, are used as a data source. Data analyses are performed following a three-step analysis procedure with the qualitative analysis software MAXQDA. The analysis covers a total of 450 entries. The results of the present study introduce a series of key projections for the scientific literature, practitioners, and administrators.