IS TOURISM INDUSTRY READY FOR CRYPTO CURRENCY: A CASE OF ESKIŞEHIR
Yuliia Borovska, Hakan Yılmaz · Tourism, leisure and global change · 2019
Every day our world is becoming more and more digital and the technologies are developed with incredible speed. One of a result of these developments is crypto currency. Crypto currency is a currency that uses cryptography at its core (the science of encryption). Nowadays all the crypto currencies that are represented on the market were first introduced in 2008 by a person or a group of people named Satoshi Nakamoto. Since the crypto currency is a new financial instrument, the possibility of using crypto currency is getting debate in the tourism industry. The purpose of this work is to understand whether the tourist industry is ready for crypto currency and whether it will be able to accept the crypto currency as a new payment method. In this article, deep interview method is employed in order to reveal tourism managers attitudes and perceptions towards crypto currency usage in tourism. The implementation was accomplished within the scope of the 8 hotel and 2 tourist agencies in Eskisehir, Turkey. The data were collected through face-to-face interviews during the period May, 2018. Findings show that the tourism industry refused to be ready to introduce crypto currency as a method of payment for tourist services.