Tourist arrivals in Antalya tops 10 million
ANTALYA
More than 10 million foreign tourists have already arrived by air in the Turkish holiday hotspot Antalya this year.
The number of foreign visitors between Jan. 1 and Aug. 22 increased by 20 percent from a year earlier, according to the provincial directorate of culture and tourism.
From Aug. 1 to Aug. 22, around 1.88 million tourists entered the city via the Antalya Airport and the Gazipaşa Airport, marking a 10 percent increase compared with the same period of last year.
As a whole in 2022, despite the war between Russia and Ukraine, more than 13 million foreign holidaymakers visited the city on the Mediterranean coast, most of them Russians, Germans and Britons. Holidaymakers from Poland and the Netherlands constituted the other major groups.
In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the global travel and tourism industry, Antalya welcomed a record 15.6 million foreign tourists.
The World Travel & Tourism Council’s (WTTC) forecast in a recent report that the size of the global tourism industry will reach $15.5 trillion in 2033. WTTC projected a 6.1 percent average annual growth globally by that time.
Travel and tourism will employ some 430 million people around the world by 2033, which would amount to about 12 percent of the working population in the world, according to the report.
Türkiye will continue to be one of the leading countries in the tourism industry, said Müberra Eresin, the president of the Hotel Association of Türkiye (TÜROB), commenting on the WTTC report.
She noted that hotel occupancy declined slightly this year. “However, we are not demoralized. The quality of services the Turkish hospitality sector offers is well appreciated around the world. We are offering a wide range of services and products.”
Türkiye has strong competitors in the tourism sector, but it has the potential to attract a large number of tourists in the years to come, commented Ali Onaran, the board chair at Prontotour, noting that the growth of the Turkish tourism sector has exceeded the growth in the global tourism in the past 20 years.
