Over a million foreign tourists have visited Turkish Antalya since the beginning of the year.
According to this indicator, this year has approached the pre-pandemic year of 2019, when 1.2 million foreigners visited the Mediterranean resort over the same period, Osman Aik, an adviser to the mayor of Antalya, who previously headed the Federation of Turkish Hoteliers, told TASS on Tuesday.
“The first four months of this year were generally good for Antalya and Turkey. We are trying to compensate for the losses due to the decline in tourist activity from the Russian Federation and the CIS countries due to the Ukrainian crisis by diversifying destinations. We also seek to minimize the consequences for the tourism sector of the pandemic, which affected it is extremely negative,” he said.
According to him, the Turkish tourism industry is an industry with almost 50 years of history, it has experienced various crises and is already immune from crises. “This is the sector in which the maximum domestic capital is invested in our country, and which is always associated with the world and makes the biggest contribution to it,” Aik added.
Over 30 million tourists visited Turkey last year, of which almost 4.7 million came from Russia. About 3.6 million Russian tourists rested in Antalya in 2021, the mayor of the resort, Muhittin Bocek, told TASS earlier. This year, the Turkish authorities initially expected to receive about 7 million Russian tourists, but due to the Ukrainian crisis, this figure was reduced to 3.5 million people.