I would like to start my article with a line from the late #ÖzdemirAsaf’s poem #Lavinia. “If you want lies, I’ll tell lies”
The purpose of this article is not to denigrate the Turkey’s tourism or to belittle the investments made, but to draw attention to the motto of “better is possible” with constructive criticism in the light of statistics.
According to the news published on the website #Ekonomim on January 6, 2023, 148 new hotels, 67 of which are 5-star, are planned to be put into service in 2023, Turkey!
Of course, everyone who hears the news, things are going well, new hotels are coming, more employment etc. It may feel good, but this is a result of system 1 thinking.
I added links of the news and statistics mentioned in the article.
(#DanielKahneman talks about system 1 and system 2 in his book “thinking fast and slow”. People who think in system 1 react and make decisions immediately without thinking in detail. However, thinkers in system 2 think through, analyze with data, and then react)
According to the report of the Dutch #BoldData financial company covering the hotel statistics for 2019, Turkey is in the 12th place with 705 hotels in the country with the most 5-star hotels in the world.
Well, what’s wrong with that? There may be people who are -mentally- old people asking. I would like to make some explanations for them, at least my perspective on the subject is a little different.
According to the 2019 data of the World Tourism Organization #WTO, Turkey is one of the top 10 countries that receive the most tourists. However, let’s see that unfortunately, Turkey is not among the top 10 countries with the highest tourism revenues. In other words, although we are one of the countries that receive the most tourists, we are not among the top 10 earning countries.
I am not satisfied with this situation, so I sincerely hope that this will change.
For example, the number of 5-star hotels in Spain, among the top 10 earning countries, is 545, and Italy is 470! Although it is not the biggest winner, the number of 5-star hotels in Russia is 150, Greece is 444 and Portugal is 185. The issue is quality, not quantity!
According to the TDK (Turkish Language Association), I would like to remind you again about the concepts of quality and quantity;
Qualification; feature, quality, quality that indicates how something is and distinguishes it from other things. The quality of something being good or bad
Quantity: the state of something that can be counted, measured, or decreased or multiplied, quantity, quantity, quantity.
I prepared the image I used for the article based on the comments of a few 5-star hotels in Istanbul on #bookingcom (January 22, 2023). In other words, the owners of these comments are the people who have physically stayed in hotels, left foreign currency to this country, and will make advertisements or advertisements by word of mouth. These are the tip of the iceberg. There are things that I have witnessed, heard and read. Anyone who does a little research on Google and various review portals will surely find more. There are and will continue to be bad examples wherever there are people who have no vision and only care about saving the day. It may not be finished, but I believe that it will be minimized with inspections and strict follow-up. But first of all, it is necessary to see this issue as a problem and want to solve it.
#Einstein came to my rescue: “You cannot solve a problem with the level of consciousness that created it.”
Is it only the hotels in Turkey that do not do their job right and make the service defective? There will be those who say that it does not exist in other geographies. I have 2 answers to these fossil friends;
1-I don’t care!!! Is it possible to reach the best by taking the bad as the criterion?
2-Of course there is. For example, booking.com refunded me my reservation fee due to misinformation and poor service at the hotel I stayed in Sarajevo in 2017. Unfortunately, the hotel is still for sale on booking.com.
But that’s Bosnia and Herzegovina, I’m talking about Turkey. I’m talking about better expressing our climate advantages, hospitality, product diversity and many more beauties. Do you understand?
Staff shortages are rampant. Everyone who does not know how to smile and does not respect their job works in tourism. Considering the negativities in my previous articles, we should focus on; It should not be the number of hotels or star ratings, but rather to increase the quality of service in existing hotels. Unless the quality-of-service increases, neither the employees, the enterprises nor the country’s sustainable tourism income wealth will increase. Hotel chains that do their job well individually, by providing good service to both their employees and customers in a smart way! They will continue to increase their income. But in order to develop the country’s tourism in a total sense, we need to increase the service quality to an average level. The proper authorities should send the facilities that make their customers unhappy, change personnel very often, and have very bad reviews, to different sectors and lead to those who will do their job better!
As my teacher #AvniAker mentioned often in her book “tourism is the future”, “tourism is the future”, so no one has the right to endanger the future of the country. This is how the issue should be viewed.
If the customers in x hotels in the same city leave the country satisfied, but the customers in y hotels in the same city leave the country unhappy because of their bad experiences, someone needs to stop this.
Some hotel managers only look at money because they do not understand hotel management. For this reason, they do not even deign to reply to bad comments about the hotel they own or manage. After that, they start blaming everyone, from the design of the website to the reservation system, from the reservation system to the sales team, from the sales team to low-priced rival hotels, for why my hotel is empty!
First, you will make your staff happy by making the customer who comes to your hotel happy, then the staff you make happy will make the customer who comes to your hotel happy, so you will gain from double happiness. It’s that simple, yet so difficult!
In order to overcome this difficulty, once again I hold on to the words of the late #SakıpAga who was the one of the biggest visionary business men in Turkey.
“I pity those who think that they will get rich by paying people low. Because I owe my wealth to the high salaries I give to the right people.” #SakipSabanci
Have a great week ahead
Yakup Demir January 23, 2023
https://bolddata.nl/en/database/worldwide-hotel/
https://www.e-unwto.org/doi/abs/10.18111/wtobarometereng.2020.18.1.7
Is it Quantity or Quality that Matters in Hotel Investment
yeicgezsev.com 