The 5th World Conference for Graduate Research in Tourism, Hospitality and Leisure: 887-893, 25 - 30 May 2010, Cappadocia, Turkey Printed in Turkey. All rights reserved ISBN: 978-605-5681-67-8 Analysis of Safety of Tourist Health: A Study of Thermal Resorts in Turkey Doctor of Philosophy Uğur Çalişkan Institute of Social Sciences Dokuz Eylul University, Turkey E‐mail: ugurcaliskan36@gmail.com Supervisor: Özkan Tütüncü, Ph.D. Faculty of Business Studies Dokuz Eylul University, Turkey Date of submission: 26 February 2010 ABSTRACT Ancient travels to the thermal resources were the first tourism travels. In the ancient times, Chinese, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Italians, Germans were utilizing the thermal waters for therapeutic purposes. In Europe, it was the Roman time that the facilities called “Tharmae” to use the thermal waters were built. It is essential part of expectations to have the holiday in healthy and safe place and to return to home without encountering any problems. According to World Health organization (UNWHO) health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well‐being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity (UNWHO 1948). Healthy and safety image of the country is one of the priority items in competition (Koyunoğlu 2003) and health tourism is to leave the living place for a temporary period to recover the health, to have a holiday in a healthy environment (Mathieson and Wall 1982; Wright 1988; Goodrich and The 5th World Conference for Graduate Research in Tourism, Hospitality and Leisure 888 Goodrich 1991; Weilar and Hall 1992; Kozak 1996; Ross 2001; Mueller and Kaufmann 2004; Connell 2006; Chen, Prebensen and Huan 2008). Quality of the services offered to tourists, plays an important role to decide to go to a destinations or not. Tourism activities to be made in healthy and safety conditions is important for the service quality and tourist satisfaction and within the competitive tourism market the safety issues have become impor‐ tant part and the vitrine of quality (Richter and Waugh 1986; Pearce 1988; Edg‐ ell 1990; Ryan 1993; Steinmueller 2005; Wilks and Handzsuh 2006). There are few studies of tourist safety in thermal resorts and none conducted in Turkey. Also, the number of valid and reliable surveys related to tourist safety in ther‐ mal resorts worldwide is limited. This study conducted the measure how the staff think about the tourist health and determine the deficiencies in the resorts to be able to use our geo‐ thermal resources in the world market efficiently to generate economic and social development. The study field is chosen as 5 star thermal resorts because they are supposed to have the best physical service standards among the ther‐ mal tourism facilities in Turkey. To search the staffs’ views about 5‐star thermal resorts in Turkey, firstly the pilot questionnaire form was prepared and applied to 30 people working in Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The pilot results were used to improve the clarity and readability of questions and the incoher‐ ent and disordering questions were removed to prepare final questionnaire form. The questions of Tourist Safety are adopted from Texas University question‐ naire form and work ethics and ethical climate questions was modified version of Victor and Cullen’s studies (1988) and the questions of “Quality System” are taken from the “Quality Management System Scale” developed by Özkan Tütüncü (Tütüncü and Savran 2008). The questionnaire forms are copied due to the personnel number of thermal resorts acquired by interviews of resort managers. The total 349 questionnaire forms are completed and the data obtained is analyzed by SPSS 17.0 statistic program. Questionnaire consists of 6 divisions and 55 questions inquiring safety in the tourist resorts with 19 sentence, business ethics and working con‐ ditions (12 sentence), quality system including 19 sentences, work loyalty with 5 sentences, general views about 4 dependent variables and finally 6 demo‐ graphic questions. To reach more reliable results, five point Likert scale was used in these parts, ranging from “definitely agree (1)” to “definitely disagree (5)”. But, in the questions of “work loyalty” to avoid confusion with the results