Cultural Tourist Typologies of Domestic Tourists Attending to Şeb-i Arus Ceremonies

The purpose of the study is to determine the cultural tourist typologies of domestic tourists attending Şeb-I Arus Ceremonies and to find out whether the cultural tourist typologies differ depending on tourists’ demographic characteristics. Findings of this research are of importance in that they offer better goods and services to tourists by giving insight on domestic cultural tourists attending Şeb-i Arus Ceremonies - an international event that takes attention of a lot of domestic and international tourists. In line with the purpose of the study the face to face interview method was applied and 463 valid surveys were obtained using the easy sampling method. While determining the cultural tourists typologies, the method Mckercher put forward in 2002 was used. With this method, cultural tourists were divided into 5 groups by taking their visiting purposes and experiences into account and those groups were named as purposeful, casual, sightseeing, incidental and serendipitous cultural tourists and to determine differentiation between cultural tourist typologies and tourists’ demographic characteristics Chi square test is used. Findings show that 57,9% of tourists are purposeful, 35,9% are sightseeing, 3,5% are casual, 2,4% are incidental and 0,4% are serendipitous cultural tourists. Demographic findings show that 69,1% of the tourist are women, 61,6% are married, 28,3% are 61 years old and over, 48,6% own bachelor’s degree, 35,2 % have 1500-2000 TL income and 30% are retired. In addition, it was determined that 73,3% of tourists attended the ceremonies with the advice of family and friends, 66,3% came to the destination for the first time, 34,6% stayed one day, 78,4% bought souvenirs and 54,2% allocated 100 TL budget for souvenirs. As a result of the chi square test, it was found that cultural tourist typologies differ significantly in terms of age, marital status, level of education, occupation, monthly income, time spent in destination and allocated budget for souvenirs variables. When the results of the research are evaluated in general, it is seen that the majority of the local tourists who attend Şeb-i Arus ceremonies travel for cultural tourism and gain an in-depth experience with destination.