Environmental management practices of yacht port operators in the aegean region

Marine tourism has emerged as one of the most popular tourism branches in recent years. Yacht tourism, which is one of the most important elements of sea tourism, is an indispensable tourism component for Turkey, which is surrounded by seas on three sides, and needs to be developed with constant emphasis. Environmental considerations should always be considered while developing this tourism component. As a matter of fact, marinas and yachts are areas that have the potential to pollute the environment with various wastes by their nature. In this thesis, environmental management practices of marina operators in the Aegean Region were investigated. Within the scope of the research, data were collected by applying a semi-structured data collection tool to marina operators, yacht owners and yacht captains, and the collected data were analyzed with descriptive content analysis, which is one of the most preferred methods in social sciences qualitative research designs. As a result of the research, the environmental management practices of the marina operators in the Aegean Region, the problems encountered during the implementations, the perspectives of the marina companies on the environmental management practices based on volunteerism were revealed and suggestions were made for the following period studies. Another point that makes the research important is that the applicability of the Green Port concept, which is not currently within the scope of marina operations, for marina operations has been examined.