ANKARA: Tourism revenues in Turkey declined 4.4 percent to $12.29 billion in the third quarter, the Turkish Statistics Institute (TÜİK) said on Oct. 30, amid security concerns and a decrease in the number of Russian tourists visiting the country.
The country’s tourism revenue was announced as $4.87 billion in the first quarter, a 1.3 percent decrease from the same period of 2014.
While 80.9 percent of this income (excluding GSM roaming and marina service expenditures) was obtained from foreign visitors, 19.1 percent was obtained from Turkish citizens who reside abroad, according to TÜİK’s data.
Visitors either organized their travel individually or with package tours. While individual expenditures constituted over $8.9 billion of the total tourism income, around $3.3 billion was obtained by package tour expenditures, according to the TÜİK data. Turkey’s tourism industry may close this year with around $10-11 billion in losses amid a dramatic loss in Russian tourists and a sharp slash in hotel room prices across the country, according to leading sector representatives.
Decline in foreign people visiting Turkey
The number of foreign arrivals to Turkey continued to drop in September, according to data released by the Tourism Ministry on Oct. 27.
The number of foreigners arriving in Turkey in September 2015 was 4.25 million, down 2.31 percent from the same month of the previous year, according to the ministry’s data, which also showed the declining trend in the number of Russian tourists was still the case in September.
While Russian tourists made up almost 14.65 percent of Turkey’s visitors last September, this figure dropped to 12.44 percent of total visitors in the same month of 2015. Some 529,000 Russian people visited Turkey this September, according to the fresh data.
The share of German visitors increased from 14.84 percent in September 2014 to 15.62 percent this September, although the number of German visitors overall showed a slight decrease compared to last year.
A total of 664,300 Germans visited the country in September this year, according to the ministry.
Visitors from Europe, who constitute over half of all visitors annually, slipped 5.9 percent in September to 2.22 million from 2.36 million a year earlier.
