TUR STLER N E T M DURUMU VE C NS YETLER N N OTEL SE M NE ETK S : ZM R’DE B R ARA TIRMA (EFFECTS OF EDUCATIONAL STATUS AND GENDER OF TOURISTS ON THE CHOICE OF HOTEL: A RESEARCH IN ZM R)

The purpose of this study is to determine factors affecting the choice of hotel of persons traveling for tourism purposes. The study also aims to identify the differences in factors which have an impact on the choice of hotels depending on individuals’ gender and educational background. To achieve this aim, the scale which was developed by Sohrabi et al. was translated into Turkish and conducted as a pilot study in Ku adas before being applied to the randomly selected 166 participants living in zmir. Preliminary construct validity of hotel selection factors was tested using exploratory factor analysis. After the main study hotel selection factors were determined as; service quality, price, and cleanliness of room, location of the hotel and climatic conditions, hotel’s environment and network services. Internal consistency, as assessed by Cronbach's alpha, for each of the content areas within each of five hotel selection factors was found to be adequate to demonstrate reliability. As a result of the factorial MANOVA test, price and service quality was found to be more important than cleanliness of rooms, climatic conditions, hotel’s environment and network services. In addition, it is identified that people having graduate education degree give more importance to service quality, women to cleanliness of rooms and men having undergraduate degree to price in their hotel selection.