Turkish authorities refute claims that foreign tourists suffer due to ‘e-visa’ system

ISTANBUL

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The Foreign Ministry has refuted media reports suggesting that thousands of foreign tourists had not been allowed to enter Turkey with e-visas at Dalaman Airport and Milas-Bodrum Airport, and that some of them had even been sent back to their home countries.

“Those media reports do not reflect the truth. Recently, there were no problems in entries with e-visas in either Milas-Bodrum Airport, Dalaman Airports, or in other border gates,” a Foreign Ministry statement said late on Aug. 19.

A number of reports had claimed that e-visas for tourists, applied for online rather than at the airport, were only being accepted at airports in Turkey’s two largest cities - Istanbul and Ankara - causing chaos at a number of other tourist hotspots.

However, the Foreign Ministry statement said that since Jan. 1, 2014, a total of 287,604 foreigners had entered Turkey using e-visas through the Milas-Bodrum Airport, while 646,382 had entered using e-visas via Dalaman Airport.

A total of more than 4.5 million e-visas have been provided up to Aug. 19, the statement also said, with 35 million tourists having visited Turkey.

The local police department in the southern province of Muğla, where Dalaman Airport is located, also denied media reports that foreign tourists were suffering from the e-visa system.