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Having geographical and cultural proximity to the Middle East countries undergoing great deal of political, economic and sociological changes in the last years as a result of 'Arab Spring', as well as struggling with China-Wuhan-originated deadly worldwide coronavirus (COVID19) pandemic in 2020, Turkey faced with many problems in many sectors particularly in tourism as a result of current incidents and unexpected crises. From this point of view, the main purpose of this research is to reveal how the tourist guides assess the characteristics of tourism sector and which alternative solutions they suggest against the current events. The qualitative research method is adopted in the exploratory study using a holistic multiple case pattern. The data obtained from the interviews with 60 professional tourist guides were subjected to descriptive content analysis using the coding method. According to the findings "sensitive structure, competitive structure, substitutability and damage to the country image were found out to be four main characteristics of tourism industry. Practical solution proposals by guides associated with tourism industry have been emerged in a total of 14 themes with 64 subthemes.

Distinguishing the society from others, cultural assets create a unique local culture experience for tourists and lead to satisfaction by influencing the novelty seeking motivation.Based on this hypothesis, the aims of this research are as follows; a) to examine the effect of the local cultural experience on novelty seeking behavior, b) to examine the influence of the local culture experience on tourist satisfaction, and c) to assess the mediating role of novelty seeking between local cultural experience and satisfaction. Using structural equation modeling, a comparative study was carried out on Turkey's most-tourist attracting destinations which have distinctive DNA's in accordance with their specific positioning strategies. Findings revealed that local culture experience, novelty seeking and tourist satisfaction variables are associated with each other in both destinations. The SEM suggests that the novelty seeking variable have the mediating role between local culture experience and satisfaction.