Opinions and practises of traditional cafe, restaurant and patisserie owners after smoking ban law in the city center of Malatya

The ban of smoking in closed public places is one of the vital strategies in the fight against tobacco since it is the most important health problem of the world. For this purpose, the Law No. 5727 came into force on 3 January 2008 in our country.The aim of our study was to investigate the opinions and practices of traditional café, restaurant and patisserie owners after smoking ban law in closed areas. The sample in our study involved 125 traditional cafes, 99 tea houses, 110 restaurants, 24 cafeterias, 20 patisseries and 8 pubs in the city center of Malatya. The researcher himself applied the questionnaires to the owners or to the responsible managers through face to face interviews between June and September in 2010.The mean age of the participants was 37.2 and out of 386 participants, 378 (98 %) were men. While 218 people (56.5%) were the owners of the workplaces, 168 (43.5%) people were responsible managers. According to the results, 63 owners (16.4 %) expressed that their profits didn?t decrease during the first three months after the implementation of the Law whereas 111 people (45.6 %) expressed a decrease by 61% and over in their profit.When only the traditional café owners were taken into consideration, the decrease during the first three months was 65.5% whereas it was 33% in other enterprises. While 9.2 % of the owners of the enterprises except traditional café owners expressed that they were going to end the business in the future, 40.8 % traditional café owners claimed that they would end the business soon (p<0.05). As a result, it was determined that traditional café owners were the worst affected business owners from the smoking ban law.Key words: Smoking ban, hospitality sector