Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
II. ULUSLARARASI MEZOPOTAMYA İNANÇ VE KÜLTÜR TURİZMİ KONGRESİ (IMFCT) 2024, Mardin, Türkiye, 5 - 07 Aralık 2024, ss.4-5, (Özet Bildiri)
In tourism, destinations provide tourists with a variety of options and experiences and there is a variety of dynamic elements influencing a destination's awareness. These days, it seems difficult to establish a distinctive destination identity because of the quickly evolving technological options and consumer preferences (Özdemir, 2008). This is why it's critical to raise the destination's profile and make sure it develops into a brand. The process of destination branding is the result of collaboration and solidarity between a tourism destination's stakeholders (Prideaux and Cooper, 2003). Festivals staged in popular tourist destinations provide visitors with a variety of experiences as a result of this collaboration. They are, therefore, believed to be useful for destination development and branding. They serve as effective instruments to help promote destinations and provide economic benefits (Çoban and Süer, 2018). Additional benefits of festivals include the creation of job possibilities during their planning, the enhancement of destination aspects' visibility, cross-cultural communication and engagement, and the establishment of a tolerant atmosphere. It is also feasible to list certain drawbacks, such as potential environmental contamination, exceeding the carrying capacity etc. All of these factors make careful preparation and organisation essential to the success of festivals and their maximum benefit to the local community. Few studies have examined the function of festivals and their effects on destination branding (İlban and Kömür, 2019; Çoban and Süer, 2018; Kaya, 2014; Kaya and Keleş, 2017). Besides, the literature search did not yield any empirical research on the cultural route festivals, which are organised annually by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and were first introduced in 2021, The research's goal is to investigate how festivals contribute to the branding of tourism destinations. The Çanakkale Cultural Route Festival, which is hosted by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in the province of Çanakkale, was selected as the study sample. Considering the small number of scientific studies in this sector and the lack of scientific studies in the study region, it is thought that the research will add to the body of literature. In-depth interviews, one of the qualitative research techniques, were used to gather data from 12 festival attendees for this study. The Çanakkale Cultural Route Festival was deemed significant for the Çanakkale destination, according to the data analysis, while certain aspects of the event required improvement. The conclusions reached and the recommendations derived from them are thought to be beneficial to practitioners