MY RURAL HOME

'My Rural Home' is a social enterprise that promotes small-scale rural tourism businesses at the national and international level. The vision of our initiative funded by the European Union within the scope of the Smart Start Project; to enable independent, local tourism initiatives to make their voices heard in the international market.

Our mission is to ensure that tourism enterprises which are located in rural areas meet the service, education and technology criteria required by the modern needs; to serve to the establishment of responsible tourism awareness in both businesses and tourists, to adopt a tourism that has minimized the damage to the environment and maximized its social and economic benefits to the local area, while ensuring that they have low-budget and high-quality international marketing opportunities by making use of the sharing economy.

We have been carrying out activities related to rural tourism for a long time. Despite the high potential we see, we see that small tourism entrepreneurs are left to their own fate, as there is a lack in destination management approach in our country. We can see that a considerable market could be formed by combining with the customer mass who are bored of city life and villages, when a chance is given to tourism businesses that are too small to be in the interest of large tour operators, and with too little capital to survive with the commission rates of internet booking sites. Moreover, it is very clear that the entry of large tour companies into rural areas, where infrastructure is designed for a small population, would have a negative effect on the environment. We have determined that the closest application to destination management in our country is made by municipalities. Therefore, our most important partner in this social enterprise is the Municipalities. By applying our system, municipalities will be able to provide services to villages related to the development of tourism in rural areas. The businesses that are members of the 'My Rural Home' web portal will be visited by our team and examined whether they comply with the responsible tourism criteria stipulated by our portal. The development needs of the business will be reported and included in the training programs to be prepared by our initiative, or if it meets the criteria, promotional films and photographs will be taken and placed on the portal. Reservation requests coming to our portal related to the business will be directed to the business, reservations will be received and businesses will be informed by maintaining communication with those in foreign languages.

Our initiative supports rural tourism entrepreneurship, which will greatly contribute to rural development. Tourism entrepreneurship is a very important issue primarily for women's employment in rural areas. In addition, it will prevent the emptying of villages due to economic reasons, and the supply chain that will be formed around the tourism sector supports small-scale farming.