A New Perspective to Social Tourism: Examining the Turkey’s Alternative Camp

Abstract

Social tourism is a tourism strategy practicing in European countries generally to increase the social integration of disadvantaged people and to create an equal social structure. In Turkey, the practices and academic researches about social tourism is lack and the existed ones are generally for municipality reputation performances. Despite this, the ‘Alternative Camp’ practice of Turkey which is in Antalya, is an example case to European social tourism models. This research aims to bring a new perspective to social tourism practices in Turkey by investigating the case of Alternative Camp. The research has been completed by using ethnographic case research methods. To gather data, face to face semi structured interviews, participatory research methods and secondary data has been used. According to research findings there are three components for an inclusive social tourism practice as; (1) accessibility, (2) diversity, (3) integrity. As a result, a new definition for social tourism has been proposed.