Turkey tourism to plunge 70% due to COVID-19

Saturday, December 12, 2020

The tourism industry of Turkey is predicted to drop by almost 70 per cent in the remaining days in 2020 as foreign tourist numbers fell massivley due to the ongoing pandemic, as pointed out by the Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy.

To quote Xinhua news agency on Thursday, “It seems that we will end the year with a 70 per cent decrease in the number of foreign tourists and a 67 to 68 per cent decrease in tourism revenues.”

The Minister of Culture and Tourism observed that at the beginning of this year, the projection for the tourism of 2020 in Turkey was higher than ever as it welcomed huge number of advance bookings from abroad in January and February 2020.

“Our goal for this year was to host 58 million foreign tourists with 41 billion dollars of revenue,” Ersoy said.

The minister further added that however, the crisis of pandemic made our goal impracticable to achieve.

The Minister further explained that Turkey is looking forward to a major recovery with a 100 per cent growth in tourism after the pandemic says a goodbye forever.

As of Friday, Turkey has reported a 955,766 confirmed coronavirus cases in total and 15,751 cases of deaths.

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