Turizm Destinasyonlarının Markalaşmasında Festivallerin Rolü: Çanakkale Kültür Yolu Festivali Örneği

In tourism, destinations provide tourists with a variety of options and experiences and there is a varietyof dynamic elements influencing a destination's awareness. These days, it seems difficult to establisha distinctive destination identity because of the quickly evolving technological options and consumerpreferences (Özdemir, 2008). This is why it's critical to raise the destination's profile and make sureit develops into a brand. The process of destination branding is the result of collaboration andsolidarity between a tourism destination's stakeholders (Prideaux and Cooper, 2003). Festivals stagedin popular tourist destinations provide visitors with a variety of experiences as a result of thiscollaboration. They are, therefore, believed to be useful for destination development and branding.They serve as effective instruments to help promote destinations and provide economic benefits(Çoban and Süer, 2018). Additional benefits of festivals include the creation of job possibilities duringtheir planning, the enhancement of destination aspects' visibility, cross-cultural communication andengagement, and the establishment of a tolerant atmosphere. It is also feasible to list certaindrawbacks, such as potential environmental contamination, exceeding the carrying capacity etc. Allof these factors make careful preparation and organisation essential to the success of festivals andtheir maximum benefit to the local community. Few studies have examined the function of festivalsand their effects on destination branding (İlban and Kömür, 2019; Çoban and Süer, 2018; Kaya, 2014;Kaya and Keleş, 2017). Besides, the literature search did not yield any empirical research on thecultural route festivals, which are organised annually by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourismand were first introduced in 2021,The research's goal is to investigate how festivals contribute to the branding of tourism destinations.The Çanakkale Cultural Route Festival, which is hosted by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism inthe province of Çanakkale, was selected as the study sample. Considering the small number ofscientific studies in this sector and the lack of scientific studies in the study region, it is thought thatthe research will add to the body of literature. In-depth interviews, one of the qualitative researchtechniques, were used to gather data from 12 festival attendees for this study. The Çanakkale CulturalRoute Festival was deemed significant for the Çanakkale destination, according to the data analysis,while certain aspects of the event required improvement. The conclusions reached and therecommendations derived from them are thought to be beneficial to practitioners