Reflection of national tourism strategies to local: GEKA case

It can be said that tourism is one of the most important instruments used for publicity and developments of the countries. Therefore, it is required for the governments ruling countries that they should have a national tourism policy or strategy. As regarded this issue in term of our country, it has been seen that tourism was tried to be developed with national tourism policies up to 2000s. But it can be said that the variations in development models also impacted tourism strategy with increasing localization tendencies through EU harmonization process. In this context, together with starting of the establishment of the development agencies based on the law 5449 in 2006 in Turkey, it has been mostly preferred regional policies rather than national policies. In this study, firstly how it was stated on national tourism strategies in either national development plans or the plans prepared by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism will be studied, later how tourism was regarded important in the plan of GEKA will be analyzed. Finally, these policies will be evaluated comparatively in the conclusion