Historical Cappadocia region Nigde province tourism potential and investigation of local people's tourism perception

The subject of this thesis is to determine the tourism potential of Niğde province and to reveal the perception of the local people towards tourism. With its cultural and natural heritage, Niğde province has a lot of value in terms of tourism within the borders of the province. Niğde, which has the potential to be popular in the Cappadocia region with its tangible cultural heritage structures such as historical mosques, churches, fountains, as well as mountains, lakes, hot springs and thermal springs, has the appearance of a city that is not known enough despite all these values. The positive and negative attitudes of the local people are very effective in the development of a province in the field of tourism. The limited number of studies in the national and international literature on the subject makes future studies important. The research population of the thesis study consists of the local people living in the province of Niğde. Due to the large size of the research population, cost, time and other factors, convenience sampling technique was used in the research. The data of the thesis study was obtained by the survey technique, which is one of the quantitative research methods. As a data collection tool, the Identification of Expressions of the Local People Living in the Province of Niğde about Tourism was used. The application of the questionnaire and the collection of data were made between 15.07.2022 and 15.08.2022. The study is completely voluntary and data were collected from 432 people by applying an online questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed with statistical package program (SPSS). Analyzes were applied to determine whether the distribution of the scales in the study was normal. Descriptive statistics such as standard deviation, mode, median, arithmetic mean, normality test were used for the analysis of the data, and factor analysis, t-test and ANOVA test were also applied. As a result of the findings, it was determined that while there was a significant difference between the age and education level of the local people and their tourism perceptions, there was no significant difference between the gender of the local people and their tourism perceptions. In our thesis, it has been concluded that Niğde has a touristic attraction in terms of tangible and intangible cultural heritage, the local people have a positive view of tourism, but tourism cannot be developed enough due to infrastructure and superstructure problems.