Just like in other industries, it is very important to choose the best possible location in hotel investments. As there are too many alternatives and changing touristic demands, there is serious competition within the hospitality sector. Therefore, all the investors want their properties located at the most profitable and competitive sites. To do so, they should decide the hotel location site by doing a well-analysed feasibility study. The hotel location selection can be influenced by some elements such as natural, economical, socio-cultural, legal, psychological factors and agglomeration effects. All of these factors have important roles of a hotel’s business success. However, especially in the last few years, the increasing numbers of hotel investments call in doubt that these factors are not considered properly. With this doubt, the main problems of this research have been revealed: what main factors do the investors consider in their investment decisions, and how do they decide the best site to locate the hotel? These problems also create the aims of this paper, which are to determine the factors that are important for investors and to find out where the most selected investment zones are. To achieve this goal, Istanbul has been divided into five agglomeration (investment) zones such as Historical Peninsula, Taksim-Beşiktaş-Şişli, Sarıyer-Maslak-Levent, Airport Area and Anatolian Side, according to their agglomeration effects. Then, interviews were completed with six hotel investors from these areas in order to get their opinions about the investment decisions. The gathered information has been analysed by the fuzyy TOPSIS method, which helps to calculate the subjective thoughts of the investors in a quantitative way. Then, the order of preference within the investment zones was calculated to determine the most popular site among the investors. The results showed that the most important factors for hotel location selection are agglomeration effects and economical factors. According to the order of preference, the most preferred location site has been determined as the Historical Peninsula, which includes Fatih, Eminönü, Sultan-ahmet and Topkapı zones.

Günümüzde birçok sektörde olduğu gibi turizm sektöründe de en doğru stratejileri belirlemek için önemli olan talep tahminleme, hem nitel hem de nicel birçok farklı yöntemle yapılmaktadır. Son dönemlerde bu yöntemlere alternatif olarak geliştirilen yapay sinir ağları modelleri, en düşük hata yüzdesi ile gerçeğe en yakın tahmin değerlerini vermektedir. Bu çalışmanın amacı, konaklama işletmelerinin talep tahminleme yaparken yapay sinir ağları modellerini alternatif bir yöntem olarak kullanabileceklerini ortaya koymaktır. Bu amaç doğrultusunda, İstanbul'daki beş yıldızlı bir otelin 2013-2016 yılları arasında satılan oda sayıları kullanılarak testler yapılmış ve yapay sinir ağı modeli ile elde edilen verilerin gerçek değerlere en yakın sonuçları verdiği görülmüştür. Bunun üzerine 2017-2018 yılları için satılan oda sayılarına yönelik tahminlemeler yapılmıştır.

The changing perception towards leadership reveals that different leadership types are felt to be needed to deal with different problems that modern organizations face. Even though there is lots of research which focuses on the effects of different leadership types on organizations’ performance, there is no research to be found which only focuses on employees’ perceptions. Therefore, this paper aimed to figure out the most important leadership characteristic for employees and their choice of leaders to work with. In order to reach these goals, a two-sectioned survey was given to eight hospitality employees in the Sultanahmet Region. Since the evaluations of the employees are subjective, the answers were analyzed with the Fuzzy TOPSIS method by transfiguring the verbal assessments of the participants into numbers to ease the decision-making process. With regard to the results, the most important leadership characteristics discovered were: being a guide to the followers, being capable of creating mission and vision, and encouraging the followers. According to employees’ leader choices, the results showed that the hospitality employees in the Sultanahmet region mostly want to work with Transformational Leaders. Considering the implementation and the results, this paper is important as a pioneering study, which will fill the gap in the literature about investigating employees’ leadership preferences and choices.

This study was conducted tries to reveal if cronyism is a problem in tourism sector just like in others, or not. For this reason, the main purpose of this study is to measure the tourism employees' cronyism perceptions and their career plateau experience arising from cronyism.Design/methodology/approach -This study was conducted with qualitative research methods and designed with exploratory research pattern. Interviews were made with 23 employees who work in different tourism enterprises. During the interviews, eight questions were asked to the participants and the answers were analyzed by content analysis.Findings -As a result, it was revealed that tourism employees were aware of cronyism in their companies, and cronyism mostly showed itself in promotion, salary increase and workload distribution. Because of the cronyism seen in promotions, employees emphasized that they began to feel distrust and did not see a future for themselves in their companies. This result shows that the cronyism experienced in tourism enterprises also causes the employees to experience a career plateau.In addition to all these results, this research is also important in that it is the first study in the literature to establish a direct relationship between cronyism and career plateau in the tourism sector.Discussion -Regardless of the sector, employees think that when they are faced with cronyism, they cannot be promoted and plan their careers as they are just because of cronyism. All of this result with cynical behaviors and being alienated to the companies and the sector itself.

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