Alternative Accommodation Businesses Within the Context of Future Jobs in the Tourism Industry

Introduction

A country can have very rich natural resources. However, if these rich natural resources have not been converted as an input to the economy, it means that they have not been sufficiently utilized. One of the potential economic forces among these natural resources are the coasts. Due to severity the socio-economic and political problems they cause, the use of the coastal areas, which are also intertwined with internal and external tourism movements, has increased after 1990’s in Turkey. This concentration on the shores is undoubted of great importance for Turkey, which has 8272 km of shorelines and a significant amount of inland waters.

While tourism procured goods and services from 30 sectors in the 1970’s, it currently procures goods and services from 54 main and subsidiary sectors. The annual volume of these goods and services purchased is around 11.2 billion. When the final demand for tourism is increasing by one unit, the total production increase of all sectors is about 1.7 units. Today, the tourism sector is among the sectors that increase production the most. Another aspect of the contribution of the tourism sector to the economy and social life is the employment opportunities created. The sector stands out both in terms of creating large-scale jobs and investment spending in order to provide jobs for many people.

In the Turkish economy, the industry has reached a size of 4.5-5.0 percent of the national income and 20 percent of export revenues in terms of monetary aggregate; with 11 to 12 billion dollars spent in the domestic market for goods and services, and 3.0-3.5 billion dollars for investments and renovations. The business volume created by the sector is as high as 16-17 billion dollars annually. When the other movements in the sector are also taken into consideration, this volume reaches 10 percent of the national income.

Just as in every economic activity, a development based solely on foreign demand is not healthy in tourism. Therefore, the development of domestic tourism is very important for the development of all touristic activities in the country. Domestic tourism movements which started in the 1930s in Turkey have somewhat developed with the increase of income, welfare and cultural level of the people, but have not reached the desired levels. There are important reasons for this. The most important reason is the concentration of secondary housing on the coasts especially from the 1980s onwards. Thus, tourism mobility within the country has decreased or secondary housing has been in the forefront in terms of domestic tourism mobility. Even the mobility of domestic tourism has been perceived as traveling to and from second homes. Therefore; after the 1950s, a rapid increase in the number of second homes was observed, especially in the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts. The desire of people to free themselves from the turmoil of cities and to have a new residence, the attractiveness of coastal areas that allow many recreational activities, and many other factors have caused the shores to be filled with secondary homes.

As a result of the rapid development of transportation and communication technologies, improvements to income distribution, and the right to vacation becoming widely demanded by the masses, the tourism market is expanding all over the world. The demands are diversifying and different sub-markets that address the increasingly varied understandings of vacation and accommodation in the growing tourism market. While economic package tours, mass tourism, and demands for accommodation that meets these trends are on the rise, individual pursuits that are completely outside of this, those of whom that do not prefer mass tourism have also increased. Home tourism meets the demands of travelers who primarily travel for cultural tourism; the desire to rent a home or a condominium, etc., within the historic fabric of the city they visit; prefer to shop around just as the locals of the destination, and often meet their own travel needs individually. In other words, the target audience of domestic tourism does not coincide with that of hotel tourism, and these are tourists with completely different preferences. In this context, domestic tourism is not competing against hotels but is a model that meets the needs of those who have different accommodation and travel preferences.