Nearly 980 cruise ships visit Turkish ports in 11 months

ISTANBUL

A total of 975 cruise ships visited Türkiye’s ports between January-November this year, data from the Transport Ministry have showed.

Those cruise liners brought around 997,000 holidaymakers.

In the same period of 2021, only 75 cruise ships with 45,000 passengers on board docked at Türkiye’s ports.

In terms of cruise ship traffic, August was the busiest month, when 160 ships carrying 176,000 passengers visited the country. In October nearly 206,000 passengers arrived in Türkiye on 155 cruise ships.

The Kuşadası district in the province of Aydın on the Aegean coast, was the main destination for cruise ships. In the first eleven months of 2021, Kuşadasi received 455 cruise ships and 488,000 visitors.

Istanbul ranked second at 117 ships and 248,000 passengers, followed by Bodrum at 98 ships and 96,000 visitors.

The war between Ukraine and Russia adversely affected the cruise tourism in the country’s Black Sea region this year.

Tour operators canceled programs for 39 cruise ships this year, people from the industry said last month.

If the war had not broken out, some 40,000 European and American tourists could have visited the northern province of Trabzon, said Yusuf Ziya Çakır, from a local tourism agency.

Only seven cruise ships visited Trabzon this year, while the port in the province of Sinop, on the Black Sea coast, welcomed 14 ships in January-November.