Browsing by Author "Paananen, Kaisa"

The focus of this study is locations of hotels. Location has a huge meaning in hotel business. In urban tourism, researching the location is logical, because hotels are tourism elements that are only used almost entirely by tourists. The area research in the thesis is the capital region of Finland. The research is carried out by using the principles of inductive research, The method used are GIS analyses and interviews. With the help of GIS analyses, the location is studied by using a typology of hotels in a tourist city developed by researchers Ashworth & Tunbridge. In this typology, hotels are divided under six locations: hotels in traditional market/city gate, near railway station, main access roads, in nice and practical locations, in transition zones of CDB and the historic city and in urban periphery. Data is also analyzed with models of urban structure and Leisure product model. Themes are formed based on start-up year, size, level of chains and quality. Interviews will give more information about the background of the locations and the influences of planning. SeutuCD10 is used as a data. In additional data has been collected manually. As in the typology, also in the capital region of Finland the development of vechicles has had a major impact in the hotel sector. There are clusters of hotels near railway stations, and these areas have been popular locations for hotels from early days of railway. There is a cluster of hotels near the airport, and in that area there is also a postmodern entertainment center. The biggest difference compared to typology is that in the capital region, there are not any hotels in the traditional market locations nowadays. There are also hotels in the capital region that are difficult to categorize using this model for example hotels away from city center, near some elements of nature and hotels near harbors. Based on results, the hotels in the capital region of Finland are divided in nine different categories. Four of these are not mentioned in typology. These are hotels away from city center, hotels in trendy areas in the outskirts of city center, hotels in CBD and hotels near passenger harbors.