Congress tourism in Ankara: A research devoted to viewpoint of group a travel agencies

All over the world today, along with the great efforts made to clear tourism from its identity as holiday tourism, efforts are also made to bring it inland from the seas, spread it across the four seasons, and use nature as the main supply without demolishing it. Tourism is trying to be spread out in terms of place and time with different variety like cultural tourism, golf tourism, conference tourism, special interest tourism, high plateau tourism, farming tourism, etc. Amongst these tourism alternatives, conference tourism is one that is the most provoked type of tourism today because it lengthens the tourism season, gives a chance for countries to move the intensity of popular destinations elsewhere, and increases the foreign funds of the country since the attendees of the conference would spend more money as compared to tourists.In this study, the analysis of conference tourism as an alternative tourism, the evaluation of the conference market in relation to conference tourism, and Ankara's status quo on this scope of business along with the view of A class travel agencies on conference tourism are examined. The reason the research is applied in travel agencies is because 90% of conference organizations in Turkey are made through travel agencies. According to TURSAB's 2008 data, there are 349 active A class travel agencies in Ankara. Since we could only reach 98 of these travel agencies during our study, our study is only limited to these 98. The research data is limited to the answers the agencies have provided for the survey.According to the results of this research, it is understood that the conference tourism has not developed adequately in the city of Ankara and that the halls, bed capacity, fast local transportation means for large conference organizations are not sufficient, along with the fact that coordination between institutions are not established for large scale conference organizations. The agencies in Ankara think that conference tourism as tourism in Ankara is an impulsive force, yet they find the applications on this matter insufficient. For this reason, they agree with all the proposals presented, and it has been observed that according to the factor analysis in the study, the views of the travel agencies on conference tourism in Ankara can be grouped under certain headings. This study shows us which conference tourism factors should be taken into consideration and how they should be ranked to be helpful if a study is to be made in an area on conference tourism. Local tourism authorities in the cities can use the headings these factors make up and analyze the sentences that make up the factors to plan projects for conference tourism and form a working scheme.