Istanbul, Aug 6 () – Turkish tourism sector’s final hope during periods of fall, domestic tourists, stay either at the houses of their friends and relatives, or at their summerhouses, says Turkstat.
According to the data released by Turkstat, in the first quarter of this year 10.79 million visitors had domestic trips. Among those, the trips with one or more overnights rose by 9.6 percent, against the same period of 2014, and hit 14 million domestic trips.
The report also shows that the primary purpose of trip was “visiting relatives” with 69.9 percent, followed by “health” with 11.4 percent and “travel, leisure, holiday” with 8.8 percent. In other words, within the framework of domestic tourism movements, only 88 people out of 1,000 stayed at hotels for ”leisure and holiday” purposes.
On the contrary, domestic visitors stayed mostly at houses of their friends and relatives with 88.61 million overnights, followed by “at their own house” taking the second place with 6.5 million overnights. By type of accommodation, “hotel” took the third place in the list with 4.2 million overnights.
The data also reveals that the average expenditure per trip was 265 liras, while average number of overnights was at 7.5. Also, number of domestic visitors’ overnights was registered at 105 million.
In the first quarter of this year, domestic tourists’ trip expenditures rose by 12.2 percent compared to the same quarter of 2014, reaching 3.7 billion liras.
Domestic tourism expenditures consisted of individual spending and “package tour” expenditures. While 97.8 percent or 3.6 billion liras of domestic tourism expenditure was registered as individual and 2.2 percent or 80 million liras of this amount was of package tour expenditures.
According to Turkstat data, Turkey’s tourism income fell by 13.9 to 7.73 billion dollars. In the first quarter, this number was at 4.87 billion dollars. Accordingly, the average expenditure per visitor fell to 719 dollars from 911 dollars, in the second quarter of the year.
