The effect of Mardin province geographically marked foods on tourist experience, tourist citizenship behavior and electronic word-of-mouth (e-wom)

Mardin, a city of language, religion, tolerance and culture, is the name of a city that has a rich food culture formed by the richness of local products and the combination of various ethnic origins. The reason why the local dishes of this rich city have been forgotten is that they are not sufficiently promoted. It is necessary to make the forgotten products visible and adequately promote them with the help of various destinations. The main purpose of this study is to examine the effects of domestic tourists who visit Mardin province for touristic purposes on tourist experience, tourist citizenship behavior and E-WOM. Restaurants where local and geographically marked foods are served in old Mardin, known as 1st Street, and Artuklu, the central district of Mardin province, were selected as the study area. SPSS, a statistical program, was used to conduct scale analysis within the framework of the research. Reliability test, exploratory factor analysis and regression analysis were performed on the scales. Before the exploratory factor analysis, a missing data test was conducted. According to the results of the missing data test, it was concluded that there was no missing and/or erroneous data. The extreme values in the data set were removed and analyzes were conducted with 446 data out of a total of 500 data. As a result of the regression analysis, it was concluded that tourist experience towards GI foods has a significant and positive effect on the dimensions of tourist citizenship behavior, tourist citizenship behavior towards GI foods has a significant and positive effect on the dimensions of tourist experience and tourist experience towards GI foods has a significant and positive effect on E-WOM. This means that the hypotheses are accepted.