Relationship marketing activities in the tourism enterprises an implementation on the A group travel agenciesin İstanbul

Tourism, by rapidly growing post-industrial revolution, has become anindustry where there has been high competition. The establishments in the concernedindustry where goods and services has increasingly got more similar qualifications,the number of alternative businesses has increased, consumer?s needs, demands andexpectations have continuously been changing, have been utilizing from relationshipmarketing activities. Tourism enterprises could increase the customer satisfactionthrough relationship marketing activities and make their customers regular ones byimposing trust by increasing perceived value about the service. Owing to the fact thatsuch relations which can be established by using this way and can be mutuallyuseful, can not be easily adopted by competitors and they provide an inevitablecompetitive advantage to the business in the long-term. The aim of this study, is toexamine the application ways of relationship marketing in terms of customerrelationships in tourism establishments and consumers. To achieve this goal, 96 Agroup travel agencies in Istanbul, which undertook selling-marketing activities ofpackage tours, were selected and survey was conducted on 156 managers from theseagencies. In order to describe the data, obtained at the end of the application, eachstatement frequency and ratio have been evaluated. Besides, whether views abouteach statement show great difference on 0,05 meaningful level by some qualificationof managers and the agencies at which they have been working through Independent-Samples T Test and One-Way ANOVA (One-Factor Variance Analyse). The resultsobtained reveal that agency managers have positive views concerning the effects ofrelationship marketing. However, their views about relationship marketing showsignificant difference by some qualifications (such as number of staff and number ofoffice) of travel agencies they have been working at.Keywords: Service Marketing, Customer Relationships, Relationship Marketing,Customer Loyalty, Tourism Enterprises, Travel Agency.