Antalya breaks record for daily passenger entry

ANTALYA

Turkey’s Mediterranean resort city of Antalya broke its daily record for tourists arriving by air on June 8.

“Congratulations, Antalya. This is an all-time record for daily passenger entry. The number of arriving passengers is 85,205 on June 8, 2019,” Antalya Governor Münir Karaloğlu announced in a tweet on June 9.

The number of incoming tourists on a monthly basis also showed an increase of 17 percent with 570,422 visitors to the city, he added.

So far, 3,870,211 tourists have visited Antalya this year with an 18-percent increase compared with last year, he also said.

Some 1,702,296 foreign tourists, including nationals from 174 countries, arrived in the city in May, according to the official data.

The number of domestic tourists visiting Antalya was 45,918 in May, the provincial culture and tourism directorate statistics show.

Unsurprisingly, Antalya was favored mostly by Russians with 805,040 tourists from Russia in May. In the first five months of this year, the number of Russian tourists visiting the city hit 1,249,757 with an annual increase of 20 percent.

Trailing the Russians, 617,354 German tourists arrived in Antalya during the same period. Meanwhile, some 192,267 of tourists came from Great Britain.

Ukraine, the Netherlands, Poland, Lithuania, Belgium, Israel and Denmark were other countries in the top 10 for tourists visiting Antalya.

Some 14 million foreign tourists visited Antalya year-round in 2018. The peak of tourism season in the province was recorded as between June and September, during which the luxury hotels, beach resorts and historical places such as the Church of St. Nicholas attract hundreds of thousands of tourists every year.

Meanwhile, the tourism facilities in the Mediterranean province also hosted some 400,000 domestic tourists during the Eid al-Fitr holiday. The public holiday was extended to nine days through a presidential decree adding two weekends and two days to the three-day Islamic holiday, which started on June 4.

“During the holiday, some 5 million people hit the roads across Turkey. Some 400,000 of them stayed at the hospitality facilities in Antalya,” Osman Ayık, head of the Turkish Hoteliers Federation, said on June 8.

A total economic volume of 10 billion Turkish Liras ($1.72 billion) resulted from the domestic holiday trips between June 1 and June 10, according to Ayık’s estimate.