The aim of this research is to identify the perceptions of local people living in Karadeniz Ereğli on “tourism concept” by way of metaphors and review them by content analysis. The local people living in the aforesaid district were given the expression “Tourism is like........; because.......” and asked to fill in the empty place after tourism with a metaphor and write down their reason to prefer that metaphor. In the research, phenomenology design was used which is one of the qualitative research methods. 220 people were reached during data collection process. But the forms which were left blank or the produced metaphor and its reason were identified to have incompatible relation were not included in assessment. Therefore, 186 forms were taken into the scope of assessment. According to research findings, the local people have most produced the holiday, “traveling, tourist, historical places, journey, economy and cultural places metaphors. The metaphors produced by local people were collected under 6 categories. These categories were determined as “classic perception”, “economical perception”, “perception of historical and cultural values”, “space and nature perception”, “innovation perception”, “perception of living and nonliving creatures” respectively.