Russian tourist flow to Turkey approaches 7 million in 2019

Turkey released tourist statistics for 10 months of 2019. Russia confidently tops this rating both in the total number of tourist arrivals and in the dynamics of growth among the countries included in the TOP-5. According to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Turkey, in January-October 2019, 40,7 million foreign guests visited Turkey, which is 14,47% higher than the figure for the same period of 2018. Russia remains a source market number one for Turkey: almost 6,7 million people have already arrived from Russia for 10 months of 2019. This is an absolute record in the history of Russian-Turkish tourism. In annual terms, the number of arrivals from the Russian Federation increased by 16,94%, and this is the largest growth among the TOP-5 source markets of Turkey. The share of the Russian market in Turkey's total incoming flow for 10 months 2019 amounted to 16,44%, which became the largest indicator for the same period of the last three years (in 2018 – 16,09%, in 2017 – 15,71%).

The dynamics shown by the Russian market allow to predict a new record: now we can say that Turkey in 2019 will host more than 7 million tourists from Russia. The top markets in October also included Germany (640 thousand), Bulgaria (258 thousand), Great Britain (245 thousand) and Iran (185 thousand). In total, 14,3 million foreign guests visited Turkey in October (+14,28 by October 2018). The most popular tourist destination in Turkey in 2019 was Antalya: 14,13 million foreign tourists (34,7% of the total flow) visited the resorts of this province in January-October 2019, Istanbul was on the second line with 12,7 million (31,17 %) and on the third line was Edirne (3,73 million, 9,16%).