Impacts of events on destinations: 2011 Erzurum Universiade Winter Games

Events have started to take place as important touristic attractions among the products of tourism in recent years. These days, destinations use the event with the aim of increasing tourism supply, extending the tourism season, creating additional attractions, developing an image and providing sustainability in the marketing of destination. These events, regarded as touristic attractions have a great deal of impacts on the destinations in an economic, socio-cultural, environmental and political way as well as benefits for the tourism sector. The aim of this work is to deduce the effects on the host city of the 2011 Universiade Winter Games (2011 World University Winter Sports), as one of the important sports events, from the perceptions of the residents. The significance of this work to generate sources for the sustainable plans formed in the organizational period of this kind of events as a result of determining the effects of the activity on the host city. In this work, there has been a questionnaire study about their demographic profiles in order to identify how the resident?s perceive the event. Through out the factors which have emerged in the result of this questionnaire study, we have tried to determine what kind of effects Universiade Winter Sports 2011 does have on Erzurum as the host city.Keywords: Destination, Events, Impacts of Events, 2011 Erzurum Universiade Winter Sports