Identification of memorable tourism destination attributes: A comparative research on Antalya and İstanbul destinations

Tourism experiences that have been gained during holiday create memories in tourists' minds. In this context, the attributes of the visited destination affect the memorability of the region and total holiday experience. However, the impressions that have been formed in tourists' minds have an influence on 'post-experience' attitudes and intentions. The mail goal of the present study; (a) to specify the destination attributes that have an effect on memorability and (b) to put forward the correlations between destination attributes, memorability, satisfaction and post-experience tendencies. For this purpose, the questionnaires have been conducted in Antalya and İstanbul which are Turkey's most visited tourism destinations. The obtained data have been analyzed through SPSS 20 and LISREL 8.7 software programmes. In the light of findings, the attributes of the two main tourism destinations have been compared in depth. The results showed that the German tourists had more negative perceptions than English and Russians related to infrastructure, emotions, service quality and transportation attributes of İstanbul together with emotions and value for money attributes of Antalya. The findings indicate that there are positive correlations between experiential attributes of destination, memorability, satisfaction and post-experience tendencies. Keywords: Destination Marketing, Memorable Destinations, Experiential Marketing, Memorability, Destination Experience, Destination Attributes, Antalya, İstanbul.