The green star criteria application level of hotel enterprises serving for city tourism: An investigation in Gaziantep and Hatay provinces, Turkey

The mankind have majorly benefited from the nature since the creation and this put them to the major user of natural sources in nature. People who have required various things with alterations in lifestyles, have joined the tourism activities in order to meet their needings such as travelling, sightseeing and accommodation. There has been a major increase in environmental problems about tourism with the increase of massive tourism in 21st century. There has been several laws revealed by the governments in order to keep the capability of tourism against the environmental problems and there has been encouraging regulations implemented on companies. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Turkey have formed the program of 'Green Star' in order to increase the precision for nature and it led companies to apply the regulations of Green Star in various ways. The goal of this research contains to detect if hotel companies with 3, 4 and 5 stars in Gaziantep and Hatay provinces have differences in serve by considering the applicaiton of the regulations of Green Star and the city they serve, the number of the stars they have, the situation of ownership, history of their serves, the number of employees and rooms. A survey have been performed under the condition of picking only one manager from the 40 hotels which includes 3, 4 and 5 stars in Gaziantep and Hatay in April and May of 2015. The norms of frequency, aritmethic, average and standard devitions have been calculated at the end of the servey. On the other hand, by considering the norms have not been deviated normally, the tests of Kruskal Wallis H and Mann-Whitney U have been performed in order to test the hypothesises formed in research. As the application of the environmental protection criterias of Green Star in the hotels in both provinces were 'average', It has also been revealed that there were a specific differences between the application levels of hotels having various star numbers. It has been appeared that the most important factor for the difference according the number of the stars was because of the applications in 3 star hotels. On the other hand, there has not been a major difference observed among the application of environmental protection criterias of Green Stars but the factors of individual hotels within the differences caused by the ownership situation. In the meantime, It has been detected that hotels having 10-50 rooms and 1-50 employees have statistically major differences on application of environmental protection criterias of Green Star. However, It is one of the facts we have realised that the serving histories of hotels have not effected the application levels of the environmental protection criterias of Green Star at all.