HRIM student's paper takes top honors

“I was surprised. It was a huge honor winning for my research. It's always been the domain of graduate students,” Ayaz said.

Ayaz, an undergraduate research scholar and her adviser, Cihan Cobanoglu, assistant professor of HRIM, surveyed 450 hotel guests visiting Bodrum, Turkey, last summer.

Cobanoglu said Ayaz is an outstanding student. “I felt proud and honored when they announced that our work had won the best paper award. While it's wonderful that our research was recognized by an international organization, I'm encouraged by the findings because they are very significant and offer tourism policy changes that can benefit the country,” Cobanoglu said.

Ayaz's paper compares guest satisfaction between those who stay in all-inclusive hotels, where everything is paid in advance, with non-inclusive hotels, where only the room is paid for.

Her paper concludes that, “this finding supports the anecdotal evidence that all-inclusive hotels sacrifice quality for the sake of cutting costs. This practice will hurt the tourism business because the success of the tourism industry depends on repeat customers in countries like Turkey.”

Ayaz said she chose Bodrum because it averages 2 million tourists a year, is the second major tourist destination in Turkey, and it is her home.

“My parents are in the hospitality industry. We have hotels,” she said.