Turkey optimistic about tourism growth in 2023

Thursday, December 29, 2022

Turkey aims to attract 60 million foreign visitors next year and expects the sector to contribute $56 billion in revenue, Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said while addressing the Parliament earlier this month showing the optimism about the country’s tourism growth in 2023.

“We are revising our year-end target for 2022 to 51.5 million visitors and $46 billion in revenue,” an online news media quoted the Minister as saying.

The number of foreign tourists increased by 88.1 per cent year-on-year to reach 39.61 million in the first 10 months of this year, almost matching the pre-pandemic level of 2019, when 45 million foreign tourists travelled to Turkey, as per an official data released in late October.

This tourism growth has partly been contributed by the country’s weakened currency. The Turkish currency lira lost about 70 per cent of its value against the greenback since last year. One US dollar now is equivalent to 18.69 liras, compared to around 8 liras in September 2021. This has made the country’s tourism sector more competitive, analysts say.

Despite the tourism sector in countries such as Turkey has witnessed a strong recovery after the Covid-19 pandemic, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has warned in a report in early December that the post-pandemic rebound in tourism is at risk of slowdown as the global economy loses momentum by the energy shock triggered by the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, high inflation, and weakened household purchasing power.

Global tourism is not expected to recover until 2024 or 2025, or even later, the report added.

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