Istanbul, Nov 5 () – The tourism sector has been facing the negative impacts stemming from the fall in domestic trips and trip expenditures, along with the decline in foreign visits to Turkey.
According to “Household Domestic Tourism” data released by Turkstat, domestic trips with one or more than one overnights fell by 17 percent against the same period of the previous year, while more than 90 percent of the overnights by type of accommodation was at “house of friend and relative” in April, May and June .
Some 10 million 272 thousand residents had domestic trips in the second quarter of 2015, showed the data.
Meanwhile, domestic trips with one or more than one overnights decreased by 17 percent to 13 million trips, compared to the same period of 2014.
Primary purpose of trip: Visiting relatives
Also, primary purpose of trips was “visiting relatives” with 65 percent, while the “health” based trips was at 7.7 percent.
The rate of trips for “travel, leisure, and holiday” was merely at the 17 percent level.
Domestic visitors mostly at house of friend and relative
In this quarter, domestic visitors stayed mostly at “house of friend and relative” with some 59 million 582 thousand overnights among some 80 million 132,000.
According to number of overnights by type of accommodation, while “own house” took second place with 9 million 194 thousand overnights, “hotel” took third place with 6 million 335 thousand overnights.
Thus, the 92.1 percent of overnights was at house of friend and relative, leaving only 7.9 percent to overnights in tourism sector.
Domestic visitors spend less
In this quarter, trip expenditures of domestic tourists fell by 6.7 percent compared to same quarter of previous year to 4.38 billion liras.
While 91.6 percent of domestic tourism expenditure was individual with 4 billion liras, and 8.4 percent of it was package tour expenditures. The average expenditure per trip was around 336 liras.
(Table)
