Challenging the seasonal disadvantage assumption: quality of working life in resort-based and urban tourism employment in Turkiye

A pervasive assumption in tourism employment research holds that resort-based and seasonal employment is structurally disadvantaged relative to urban, institutionalised counterparts. This study challenges that assumption empirically. Drawing on the ILO decent work framework, we compare quality of working life (QWL) across resort-based employment in Antalya and urban tourism employment in Ankara – two structurally distinct contexts within the same national labour regime – using cross-sectional survey data from 701 tourism employees and an adapted 39-item QWL instrument operationalised across 14 dimensions. Multivariate analysis of variance, Bonferroni-corrected t-tests, and relative weight analysis (RWA) reveal a substantial multivariate effect (Pillai's trace = 0.457, p < .001): resort-based employees report higher scores on material and statutory dimensions including wages, occupational health and safety, and social security; urban employees score higher on work-life balance and developmental dimensions. Critically, RWA demonstrates that the predictors of overall QWL satisfaction differ markedly by context; the broader relational and developmental antecedent pattern was robust to the exclusion of dimensions with modest measurement reliability in the pooled and Ankara models, whereas the Antalya-specific antecedent structure remained exploratory. The findings call for context-sensitive tourism labour policy and demonstrate the value of RWA for comparative QWL research.