Hotels installing plasma TVs to attract more tourists
Posted by meb at March 19th, 2007
Parallel to the boom in the number of tourists coming to Turkey, managers at some 1,000 hotels have mobilized to install new technology in their accommodations.
Led by four and five-star hotels, almost all rooms are now replacing older TV sets that have cathode ray tubes with high-tech models that have LCDs and plasma monitors. Tour guides bringing foreigners to Turkey prefer more technologically savvy facilities, and hotels are shelling out serious amounts of money to upgrade.
Sevda Yılgaz, general manager of the Antik Hotel, a four-star hotel in İstanbul’s Beyazıt district, said they are now changing 50 old TVs with wide-screen LCDs. “The low price of electronic appliances was also a big factor in our decision,” said Yılgaz. Entrepreneurs in the tourism sector are aware of the changes in tourist’s expectations and tastes, said the President Hotel’s General Manager Erhan Çakay. He predicts that all hotels will start using thin-screened devices exclusively by 2008 at the latest.
“Hotels that don’t follow the technology trends can hardly receive bookings,” Çakay notes, adding that any hotel that strives for quality must follow new trends for their services.
Turkey’s tourism campaign, initiated and encouraged by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, is bearing much fruit; in the last two months 715,000 foreigners came to Turkey. The summer months will certainly witness higher numbers of people pouring into the country, say tourism operators, who are now trying to complete arrangements to meet the demand. They are redecorating rooms, providing more a attractive decor, placing more comfortable beds on new bedsteads and refurnishing pieces of furniture. And in addition to these routine renovations these rooms are now becoming high-tech. Hotel operators say they want to provide their guests adequate hospitality and don’t want to fall behind their competitors in other countries.
Gül Serimoğlu, owner of the Arena Hotel in İstanbul’s historic Sultanahmet district, emphasized that all newly opened hotels put plasma TVs in their rooms, adding that it is not easy for old hotels to renew their electronic equipment all at once. “A gradual transformation seems best for them, since the costs that are not easy to handle thoroughly,” he said. Serimoğlu estimated that by the end of 2008 all hotels will hang thin monitors on the walls of their rooms. The plasma campaign has another benefactor: the producers and sellers of plasma TVs. To take the biggest share in the rising demand, big producers like Vestel and Arçelik are decreasing their prices yet still earning considerable profits.
A plasma set normally sold for YTL 2,000 can be bought for YTL 1,500, or even YTL 1,200 after some bargaining.
source: Today’s Zaman
Related posts: