Local sustainability: Evaluating visitors' level of satisfaction in Cumalikizik, Turkey

Abstract

Tourism has become the largest and fastest growing industry in the world. As the tourism industry grows faster, the research on tourism grows as well, particularly in rural tourism. Tourist satisfaction becomes one of the considerable goals in every tourism research. The study seeks to determine the satisfaction level of visitors in the rural area. The study was conducted in Cumalikizik village in the province Bursa, Turkey and open-ended questionnaires were used. SPSS 20 program was also used to analyze the data gathered. The findings revealed that some factors like destination (historical texture and natural beauties), perceived value (products), and expectations had influenced the level of satisfactions of the visitors positively and negatively. It was revealed that the overall satisfaction is high, 57.44% of the respondents stated that they were satisfied and 15.13% said they were not satisfied. whereas, 27.43% did not give responses about their total satisfaction. The findings also revealed an interesting result about the hypotheses. It revealed that there was no significant correlation between the monthly income and the repetition of visit (hypothesis 1); for hypothesis 2, it revealed that there was a significant relationship between the age and the repetition of the visit.