The number of tourists visiting Turkey increased by 14.56 percent in the first five months of this year compared to the same period of 2010, data from the Ministry of Tourism and Culture have shown.
 
Some 9.25 million tourists visited Turkey in the January-May period. The number of tourists visiting Turkey in May was 3.28 million, a 4.28 percent increase over the same month of the preceding year. İstanbul received the highest number of tourists in the first five months with 2.78 million, while the number of tourists visiting Antalya and Edirne was 2.70 million and 870,000, respectively.

Germany sent the highest number of tourists to Turkey in the January-May period of this year with 1.39 million, followed by Russia with 876,000 and Iran with 747,000 in the same period. The percentage of tourists visiting Turkey from the UK, Bulgaria, France, Georgia, the Netherlands, Syria and Greece increased by 6.5percent, 6 percent, 4.29 percent, 4.18 percent, 3.88 percent, 3.81 percent and 2.74 percent, respectively, compared to the first five months of 2010. However, Russia topped the list of the countries sending the highest number of tourists to Turkey in May of this year with 525,301. This figure was 340,373 in 2009 and 454,369 in 2010. Russia was followed by Germany (457,645), the UK (339,830), the Netherlands (158,893), Bulgaria (153,551), Iran (141,119), France (133,406), Georgia (101,146), Ukraine (87,349) and the US (85,745).

In recent years the number of tourists arriving in Turkey has been steadily climbing thanks to the impact of a number of policies and related infrastructure investments, along with Turkey’s increasing popularity as a tourist destination in its immediately surrounding region. Currently, Turkey ranks seventh globally in terms of the number of incoming tourists it has and eighth in terms of tourism revenue it receives. According to figures provided by the Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat), Turkey’s tourism revenue exceeded $25 billion in 2010. In an exclusive interview with Sunday’s Zaman earlier this year, Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay mentioned that there are strong signals that this increase will continue as he expects more than 30 million tourists by the end of the year.

This recent hike in numbers in Turkey has mainly been attributed to the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa, which has had a major impact on tourist destinations in those areas. The Turkish tourism sector is seeing the benefits of this, with Turkish travel agencies already receiving a higher-than-usual volume of calls from European countries.