Evaluating the Destination Attractions from the Point of Experts’ View: An Application in Eskişehir

Tourists decide to travel based on the internal forces, but their decisions about destination choice are affected by the attractions of the destinations. In other words, destinations draw the visitors with their attractions. It is important for the destination managements to understand why tourists prefer to visit a destination. Therefore, the aim of this study is to identify relative importance of attraction criteria for Eskişehir, one of the most important destination centers located in the Central Anatolia Region in Turkey. With this aim the survey was conducted with tourism destination experts employed in universities, hotels, tourism agencies and public sector, and attraction criteria were prioritized in terms of their relative importance via Analytic Hierarchy Process, one of the mostly used Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach. The results indicate that man-made attractions (touristic purpose) are the most important criteria. According to the importance level other criteria are listed as; natural attraction, superstructure and non-touristic purpose man-made attractions respectively. Although natural attraction and superstructure take in the second and third rank out of four, they have really similar weights. Apart from this, “parks, gardens and picnic areas” and “museum and galleries” were found as the two most important sub-criteria, respectively. Theoretical and practical implications and future research suggestions are also discussed.