Tourist arrivals up by 20% in May
23 June 2008
The number of tourists visiting Turkey in May rose by 20% in May, reaching 2.7 million, according to data from the country’s Tourism Ministry.
The total number of visitors to Turkey, which includes Turks living abroad, rose 18.3% to 3.58 million.
Tourism is an important source of foreign currency for Turkey, which has a large current account deficit. In April, the number of foreign visitors had been up 8.35 percent from a year earlier.
Germany provided the highest number of arrivals at 16.71 percent or 460,000 visitors. Russia was second in number of visitors provided, making up 14.04 percent of all tourists, or 386,000 arrivals.
The Mediterranean resort city of Antalya was the top destination for foreign visitors attracting 37.8% percent of visitors. Turkey's biggest city Istanbul took second place attracting 25% of the country's tourists.
“Tourism performance has been impressive this year, with net tourism receipts in first four months expanding by 24.4% over same period last year”, Finansbank analyst Basak Karaaslan said.
“However, this improvement is far from constituting a meaningful counterbalance against the deterioration in current account balance” the analyst notes.