Destination image and a study on Trabzon province

The main objective of this thesis is to integrate the topics of destination, image and destination image in light of scientific studies by describing these concepts and to display the necessity of measuring the destinations? image before setting a marketing strategy in parallel with this image in order to marketing the destinations, which are very important point of tourism marketing. There are no thesis studies about destination image in Turkey and there are deficiencies about local statement of Turkey in the international studies. Therefore, there is a necessity to study in this field. In summary, at the beginning of the thesis destination and image concepts were identified by using previous studies. Then, destination image concept was approached. Image formation processes and stimulus factors were particularly studied. After that, the studies displaying a model were summarized. A valid model of today was taken as sample (Baloglu and McCleary, 1999) by comparing all models in these studies. The city of Trabzon was accepted as pilot region with the model and current image of the city was tried to be measured. According to the results of the study, basic factors of the Trabzon?s city image formation are faith buildings and plateau tourism. First things when Trabzon comes to mind are Mother Mary Monastery, plateaus and natural beatuies. Although age, one of the social factors, affects none of the image types, other social factors such as; sex, marital status, income and education affect the image in different ways.