EFFECT OF SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY ACTIVITIES OF THE ENTERPRISES IN ACCOMMODATION ENTERPRISE PREFERENCES OF POTENTIAL DOMESTIC TOURISTS

Abstract

In the tourism sector today, where intensive competition environment is faced, if accommodation enterprises want to get more share from this market and want to maximize their profitability, they need to make studies in order to determine the requests and requirements of tourists and to present more product and services in order to fulfill these requests and requirements. For today’s conscious and sensitive consumer, social responsibility activities of the enterprise which is providing the purchased product or service is important for selecting a product as well as its price and quality. Consumers started to pay attention and prefer the products of the enterprises which participate in social responsibility activities in their purchasing decision process. Today the enterprises which could not provide superiority against other enterprises in terms of price and quality try to become prominent with the positive values they provide to the community. Enterprises try to touch the consumers, who are becoming more selective and well informed day by day, by different methods such as social responsibility activities in order to create customer loyalty. From this point of view, the aim of this study is to determine whether social responsibility activities of the enterprises are effective in accommodation enterprise preferences of potential domestic tourists or not. In the research, in order to evaluate the corporate social responsibility perceptions of the potential domestic tourists the survey developed by taking the four dimension social responsibility model of Carroll (1991) as a basis, was used. This survey was applied to 291 people who were evaluated under the scope of potential domestic tourist. At the end of the research, it was determined that potential domestic tourists direct their preferences towards the accommodation enterprises which act respectively in “legal social responsibility”, “economical social responsibility”, “prodent and voluntary social responsibility” and “moral social responsibility” dimensions. Besides it was also concluded that the domestic tourists tend to prefer accommodation enterprises performing social responsibility activities as their education and income levels increase.