Published on : Friday, February 1, 2019
In the last few years, the Turkish tourism industry has been recovering after a wave of terror attacks in 2015 and 2016, critically broken the sector followed by a failed coup in July 2016.
“Tourism in Turkey continues to rise and break the records of recent years,” the ministry said, emphasizing that there was an increase of 21.84 percent in 2018 from 2017.
Turkey greeted over 46 million visitors last year, including 39.49 million foreigners and 6.62 million Turkish citizens overseas.
The number surpassed that of 2015 when 42 million visitors came to Turkey, before 2016 when a drop of 24.6 percent was recorded.
The last significant terror attack that Turkey encountered was at the time of the New Year celebrations in 2017 when a gunman murdered around 39 people at an elite Istanbul nightclub.
Last year, tourism income increased by 12.3 percent to reach $29.5 billion in comparison to the previous year, as per the official statistics published by the Turkish statistics office (TUIK) on Thursday.
The 2018 figure increased from $26.3 billion in the previous year, TUIK said.
Official data disclosed that 81.8 percent of the income poured in from international visitors and 18.2 percent from Turkish citizens living abroad.
In 2018, almost six million foreigners coming to Turkey were from Russia, a rise of 26.49 percent compared with 2017 and 4.5 million visitors were from Germany, up by 25.88 percent from the previous year, according to the ministry’s statement.
Tags: Turkey surged high