Ernst and Young have just released their Global Tourism report for 2023, which has ranked Turkiye as the 5th most visited country in 2022 with a total of 51m foreign arrivals, and a 21% increase on visits already for the first half of 2023.
Istanbul hosted the most amount of visitors in 2022, with a total of 16.02 million mainly from Russia, Germany, Iran, USA and the UK, however the report indicated that in the first half of 2023 there was an increase of 16.22% when compared to the same period.
In the last three years tourism revenues to GDP have increased from 2.1% to 5.1% and that figure continues to rise as the travel sector in general contributed over 7% to Türkiye’s GDP in 2022. The first half of 2023 has already seen tourism revenues increase by 27% with an estimated spend of $21.7bn, of which $80m was from the Champions League Final, held in Istanbul.
Health Tourism is also one of the leading contributors with over 740,000 people visiting Turkiye exclusively for Health reasons in the first half of 2023 resulting in revenues of around $1bn USD. The prediction is that by the end of 2023, more than 1.8m people will have come to Turkiye for health purposes, which would be an increase of 30% on 2022.
As previously discussed in other articles, the Cruise Industry is also back on track welcoming over 480,000 people in the first half of this year, with an expectation of 1.5m by the end of 2023.
The report also highlighted that package tour expenditure was up by 83.4% whilst travel services expenditure was up by 82.1%.
