The Effects of European Economic Crisis on the Tourism Travel Companies in Turkey

AbstractWhile proceeding toward completion of European Union (EU) as unified single state, major European Countries have come across with an unexpected economic crisis. In the course of this unfortunate developments, European unification as single state has become a controversial issue. There have been many reasons for that outcome. However, among explicit and implicit reasons, we could claim that leading industrialized EU countries have managed the process rather unsuccessfully. The appearant reasons for the recent outbreak of economic crises within the economic and monetary union could be cited as; differences in economic development levels within the EU countries, having an unproductive economy, excessive public expenditures & debts, and soon.It is expected that reflection of economic crisis from Greece, Italy and similar vulnerable EU countries could affect Turkey's economy adversely. In actual fact, half of the Turkey's export, 60% of all tourism revenues, 80% of foreign direct capital realization originates from EU countries. For these and similar reasons, Turkey wishes that EU would be relieved from this unfortunate economic crisis. Within the context of the above defined subject, it was intended to assess and measure the effects of European Crisis on the Turkish Tourism sector and relevant tourism companies that operating in this field.An empirical study has been made for the assessment of effects of economic crises on the expected changes of management, revenues, expenditures, employees and customers of tourism companies. The whole coaching bus companies operating in Turkey have been included in the scope of this study. The existing study is limited to only 200 coaching bus companies that have taken part in the survey. In this study, data collection has been made with survey method. The collected data has been assessed and analyzed statistically with SPSS software program.Resultant research has indicated that 200 touristic coaching companies that have been operating in domestic and foreign tours, have not been affected dramatically from recent EU economic crisis. One could say that, EU economic crisis has not narrowed the activity field of Turkish Tourism companies considerably, and compensation for the deficits was made with the marginal increase in the domestic coaching activities