Attraction factors that affect sustainability in historical refunctioned structures

Science and technology developing rapidly within the process also considerably affect social life of individuals as is in several issues. Particularly with industrial revolution, a number of changes have started to appear in working conditions, family structures, world perspectives, beliefs, and needs of individuals. As a result of these changes, numerous historical structures have lost their function and remained idle. These idle structures have gained value as the importance of sustainability in tourism has revealed. Accordingly, it was aimed to conserve scarce resources, actualize cultural sustainability, and provide social, cultural, and economic contribution around these structures by conducting refunctioning activities. In the related literature review, it was argued that sustainability of historical structures could be ensured only by sustaining them. In this context, attraction factors making historical structures located in Kastamonu as the reason to prefer in order to sustain them were questioned. Moreover, whether or not there were significant differences between these factors and demographic characteristics of participants was examined by using survey technic. A questionnaire with two sections was applied to 405 visitors staying in historical structures refunctioned as hotel in Kastamonu between October 2016 and February 2017. While the first section of the questionnaire included 17 statements about attraction factors, the second section included 9 questions asked to determine demographic characteristics of the participants. The data were analyzed by using SPSS 23 statistical software. "Percentage", "frequency" "Spearman's Correlation test" for two independent variables, "Mann Whitney U test" for two independent groups, and "Kruskal Wallis test" for more than two independent groups were used to analyze the data. According to the results of the study, it was determined that factors affecting the participants to prefer mansion hotels were culture, life style, occupation, and economic status, there was a positive correlation between these factors and these factors varied based on gender, educational level, and total monthly income among personal characteristics of tourists. Key Words: Refunctioning, Sustainability, Tourism, Touristic Attraction