A Research on Determining the Touristic Destination Image of Turkey in Iran

The purpose of the present study is to examine Iranians' opinions on Turkey's destination image and to understand what kind of channels they use to get the information. Within this context, the students studying in the faculty of economics, management and business administration in Iran-Tabriz University were interviewed face to face and 384 acceptable questionnaires were subjected to the analysis. The questionnaire scale was adopted from the studies of Echtner& Ritchie and Taşçı et al. The descriptive statistics, the factor analysis, t-Test and ANOVA test were performed on the data. As a result of the analyses, it was seen that Turkey's destination image was very positive in Iran. Although positive opinions were observed in some of the previous researches on Turkey's destination image in the eye of Iranians, the negative results regarding the overall image of Turkey were obtained in almost all studies. In the light of the positive image found out in the present study, it is recommended to consider Iran as an important touristic target market, to make remarkable investments in this market and to increase both the market share and customer share through the appropriate strategies.