Author(s): Aşkın YÜCEKAYALAR
The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) has been facing serious difficulties in all areas of life, mainly in tourism, due to being a divided island and its internationally unrecognized status. Despite the obstacles and bans also applied by the Greek Cypriot Administration (GCA), TRNC has managed to overcome most of these difficulties by the help of the extensive and continuous work of advertising and publicity agents. In this study, it has been aimed to analyze the contributions and possible damages of internet and social media advertisements on TRNC tourism. TRNC has more beaches and historical tourist attractions and a longer sandy coastline than GCA does which is seen as an advantage towards TRNC’s tourism. There have been organized various workshops regarding tourism in TRNC, the last one was held on 6th and 7th of July 2018 with the title ‘Tourism Stategies of North Cyprus 2018’. This main aim of this workshop was to come up with strategies to develop a stronger medium term tourism plan for TRNC. The purpose of workshops is to improve a sector or an institution. Neverthless, TRNC’s internationally unrecognized status as explained above doesn’t enable the country to do much improvement. One of the biggest drawbacks for tourism in TRNC is travelling options. Transportation by sea has no input on tourist arrivals, so tourists usually arrive to TRNC by air travel. However, number of tourist arrivals decreased after TRNC’s official airline, Cyprus Turkish Airlines (CTA) collapsed on July 2010 as this put a halt to direct flights to Turkey, England and Germany. This issue decreased the air travel options to only 2 or 3 airlines and ticket prices increased dramatically due to lack of competition. In this study, four videos commissioned by TRNC Ministry of Tourism and other tourism agencies two of which were released in 2016 and two in 2017 on internet and various social media platforms have been analyzed. After a critical assessment, the conclusion is that the visual contents in the videos should be backed by audio and/or written contents and that more creative commercials would make a bigger impact on the country’s publicity and the purpose of the message.
The Journal of International Social Research received 8982 citations as per Google Scholar report
