Antalya welcomes record 15.4 million tourists in 11 months

ANTALYA

A record 15.37 million tourists visited Antalya, Türkiye’s major holiday hotspot, in the January-November period, official data have shown.

In the whole of 2019, the Mediterranean province hosted 15.28 million visitors, which marked an all-time high back then.

Some 14.5 million foreign tourists from nearly 200 countries visited the city in the first 11 months of the year, while 870,000 Turks residing abroad arrived in Antalya.

Tourist arrivals in the January-November period increased by 16.3 percent from the same period of 2022, according to the numbers provided by the provincial directorate of culture and tourism.

In November alone, tourist arrivals in Antalya grew 0.7 percent from a year ago to around 405,000, with Germans constituting the largest group of foreign holidaymakers at 118,000, showed the official data.

The number of German tourists vacationing in the city grew by 25 percent compared with November 2022.

Russians ranked second at 80,000, which marked a 36 percent decline from November 2022. The number of British vacationers grew by 26 percent on an annual basis to 44,000.

The city also welcomed 17,000 Polish holidaymakers last month, up 28 percent from a year ago.

The Dutch made up the fifth largest group of foreign visitors at 6,000.

The number of Russians vacationing in Antalya increased by 15 percent in the January-November period from a year earlier to reach 3.4 million. They accounted for more than 23 percent of all tourist arrivals in the city.

German tourists rose nearly 19 percent year-on-year in the first 11 months of 2023 to 3.29 million, while the annual increase in the number of British visitors was 14.5 percent to 1.29 million.

There was a significant 40 percent increase in the number of Polish holidaymakers to more than 1 million.

However, visits by Russian and Ukrainian travelers in the first 11 months of 2023 declined compared with 2019, reflecting the impact of the war between the two countries.

Four years ago, 5.5 million Russians and more than 800,000 Ukrainians vacationed in Antalya. In January-November, only 264,000 Ukrainians visited the city.

The combined loss of Russian and Ukrainian tourists compared with 2019 was 2.66 million.

Türkiye aims to generate $55.6 billion in tourism revenues, which is an important source of hard currency, this year. The government projects that tourism revenues will climb to $59.6 billion next year and further up to $64.7 billion in 2025.