Examination of customer comments on thermal hotels: The caseof Izmir

Health tourism is a shining type of tourism and includes both health and tourism activities. While health tourism provides a source of income and image for countries, it refers to a type of tourism where people go to other countries and get quality and low-cost services. Health tourism is not only carried out for medical purposes in medical centers, but also includes chronic disease follow-up in thermal health enterprises, elderly care and rehabilitation centers. Healing areas such as healing water sources, cure centers, hot water, spa, mud baths are also included in the scope of health tourism. When the concept of health tourism is evaluated in terms of healing water resources, the concept of thermal tourism emerges. It is possible to state that the main business type providing thermal tourism sevices is thermal hotels. The service quality of thermal hotels affects the impressions of the customers. The public interpretation of customers' experiences through travel platforms can affect thermal hotel businesses and customers who want to go to these hotels. Tripadvisor, one of these platforms, helps people with customer reviews and saves time in making travel plans in order to benefit from these services. In this study, it is aimed to examine the comments of customers who receive service from thermal hotels in Turkey through the Tripadvisor travel platform. However, depending on the number of hotels, it is not possible to examine all thermal hotels in terms of time, so thermal hotels in İzmir were included in the study. The years 2019, 2020 and 2021 were included in the study. First of all, necessary data were obtained through content analysis, then difference analyzes were carried out in terms of the period of stay at the hotel and the type of travel - purpose, taking into account the criteria set for customer comments by Tripadvisor. In addition, the existence of a statistically significant relationship between the general score given by the customers and other criteria was analyzed, and it was understood that there were positive and highly significant relationships between the general scores and other criteria. Depending on the results, suggestions were made to those who are interested in the subject.