The Impacts of Perceived Crowding, and Atmospherics on Visitor Satisfaction at Cultural Heritage Sites: A Comparison of Turkish and British Visitors to Topkapi Palace, Istanbul

Abstract

Cultural heritage sites impress the visitors by their ‘worth-to-see’ architectural characteristics and historical or cultural importance. Visitor experiences at cultural areas are also influenced by site atmospherics, and crowd, that form visitors’ overall satisfaction with the site. This study aims to examine the relationships amongst visitors’ crowding, and atmospherics perceptions, and overall satisfactions in a cultural tourism area. With this purpose, a survey was conducted at one of the most popular heritage sites of Turkey; Topkapi Palace, Istanbul. Data collected from 261 Turkish and 236 British visitors, who have seen the interior and exterior parts of the Palace. By factor analysis, atmospherics is found to have two dimensions, namely; service and spatial. Analyses results exhibit that both atmospherics dimensions positively affect visitor satisfaction, although perceived crowding has a negative impact or both nationalities. Findings of this study indicate that cultural heritage sites are the areas where domestic and foreign visitors may have similar kinds of perceptions and evaluations.

Capturing Museum Experience with Emotional Transfer Theory

“…The previous studies dealing with the visitor experience in the existing museum and tourism literature (Dierking & Falk, 1992;Falk, 2009;Chan & Yeoh, 2010;Dirsehan, 2011;Alelis et al, 2013;Allan & Altal, 2016;Geiling & Ong, 2016;Çetinsöz, 2017;Kaygusuz, 2017;Kılıçarslan & Caber, 2018) evaluate the experience with other subjects or discipline. For instance, they try to explain the visitor's experience with the subjects like atmosphere, and physical facilities of a museum, new technologies or with disciplines like marketing, aesthetic, education.…”

Tourist Experiences at Overcrowded Attractions: A Text Analytics Approach

“…Neuts and Nijkamp [ 23 ] developed a crowding perception model by examining the destination environment in Bruges. Liu and Ma [ 24 ] discovered that the perception of crowdedness is not directly related to tourist satisfaction, while Kılıçarslan and Caber [ 25 ] reported contradicting results. Notably, since the nature of service offerings and atmosphere vary among different sites, Koens et al [ 2 ] made recommendations to analyze the effects of overtourism based on specific attractions rather than the whole destination.…”

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“…Personal or group standards may differ, and studies have identified various determinants of groups' and individuals' perception of crowding. Several studies show that nationality influences perception of crowding (see e.g., Jin et al 2016, Kiliçarslan and Caber 2018, Sayan et al 2013, Sun and Budruk 2017. Cultural differences are seen as the main reasons for these differences (Sayan et al 2013).…”

“…Congestion and perceived crowding can limit tourists' ability to engage in desired activities, lead to undesired social contacts and stimulus overload (Kiliçarslan andCaber 2018, p. 58, Sanz-Blas et al 2019). Due to the potential negative impacts of crowding on the visitor experience, crowding is an important element in visitor satisfaction.…”