Leisure experience of thermal hotel guests' with relationships of future behavioral tendency

Nowadays, only the functional dimensions of service (health, leisure, vitality, treatment) is not sufficient for thermal hotels and efforts have been made to differentiate. These efforts, are experiences which have been uncovered products and services offered hedonic and rational dimensions. Experiential marketing is a new concept and experience of marketing strategies used for tourism management is one of the most important service sectors. In this study, identification of hedonic and rational guests' service experiences and investigation of relations of these experiences' future behaviors are aimed at the thermal hotels which is one of the "tourism operators". The research method is quantitative, designed as field research.First of all, research on the continuation of the conceptual framework developed and afterwards a questionnaire created by using scales used in the studies on the subject. The research method is quantitative and supported by field research. The research data was collected from 387 guests stayed in thermal hotels in Ankara, Nevşehir, Aksaray and Kırşehir provinces stated in the Central Anatolia Region by convenience sampling.The data obtained with the help of thermal hotel guests in the context of personal characteristics, depending on their experience of hedonic and rational levels of service in order to identify the effect of "Multivariate Analysis of Variance" (MANOVA) was used. "Pearson Correlation Coefficients" was calculated to determine whether there is a linear relationship between hedonic and rational service experiences' sub-dimensions and future behavioral tendencies (satisfactory, loyalty and positive word of mouth (WOM) of thermal hotel guests. Finally, in order to determine the factors affecting trends in the thermal behavior of hotel guests in the future "Standard Multiple Regression" analysis was used.According to our findings, regardless of different personal of our guests, there is no difference in their thermal hotel experiences and there is positive effect in their future behavior trends due to their experiences. In primary experiences which affects guests' future behaviour trends, aesthetic, rational services related with staff, price ve clean-up/hygiene experiences came out. It seemed that the results can be yield important tips to thermal hotel managers in practice, about determining preferences in designing guest experiences.Key Words:1.Thermal Tourism2.Customer Experience3.Experiential Marketing4.Leisure Experience Management