DİJİTAL GÖÇEBELERİN DESTİNASYON SEÇİM KRİTERLERİNİN AHP YÖNTEMİYLE DEĞERLENDİRİLMESİ: TÜRKİYE ÖRNEĞİ

Abstract

Remote working, which became widespread due to the restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, has continued to become widespread after the pandemic. As a result, the digital nomad phenomenon has gained importance. Digital nomads have attracted the attention of both the academic community and countries whose economies have been damaged by the pandemic. Tourism destinations are developing various strategies to attract digital nomads like other tourists. Digital nomads, who continue their lifestyles by moving away from traditional work environments and using methods such as freelancing, remote working and traveling, take various criteria into consideration when choosing a destination. Therefore, it is important to clearly understand the destination selection criteria of digital nomads. This study aims to evaluate and weight the destination selection criteria of Turkish digital nomads. The main method of the research was a survey study for Turkish digital nomads. The surveys were conducted face-to-face and online. The survey focused on determining the order of importance of digital nomads' destination selection criteria in the literature and a few unique criteria in addition to these. The survey data was evaluated with statistical analyses and processed in accordance with the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) model. AHP is one of the MCDM (Multi-Criteria Decision Making) methods that allow decision makers to make a comprehensive and systematic analysis. AHP was preferred because it produces rational and meaningful results due to being both a quantitative and qualitative analysis, making the analysis more practical by dividing the problems into sub-problems with its hierarchical structure, and allowing the visualization and comparative analysis of the results. As a result of the analysis, the first three criteria that Turkish digital nomads care about most when choosing a destination were "safety and security", "air quality" and "cost of living". In addition, digital nomads were grouped according to gender, income, education and accommodation preferences, and the order of destination preference criteria of these groups was analyzed with the AHP method. As far as is known, this is the first study to rank the criteria that digital nomads take into consideration when choosing a destination.