Are you hopeful of Turkey being added to the air-bubble agreement that exists in India? How is the COVID situation being tackled in Turkey?
As known, Turkey is one of the first countries in the world to open its borders for the international visitors. This step was taken by introducing the Safe Tourism Certificate Program for the tourism industry, which covers a broad range of measures including transportation, accommodation, health condition of employees of the facilities and passengers. The resort destinations of Turkey such as Antalya, Bodrum, and the classical destinations such as Istanbul and Cappadocia are among the main attractions experiencing most number of international tourists since the mid of June 2020. The majority of international visitors came from United Kingdom, Russian Federation, Germany and Ukraine. Thanks to all precautions being taken in the touristic facilities, our country received around 13.5 million international visitors between January – October 2020. I am very happy to mention that we do not have a particular increase in the number of Covid-19 cases in these touristic destinations. I believe that Safe Tourism Certification System has played an important role for achieving this success.
Turkey has already officially applied to the Indian government for the resumption of direct air connectivity between our countries, either by establishing an air-bubble agreement or by resuming the scheduled flights. The reply of Indian government is still pending.
How severely, in your opinion, has the tourist traffic between the two countries – Turkey and India been affected? When do you see outbound traffic from India to Turkey going back to what it was in 2019 or pre COVID times?
We have witnessed 70 % and 56 % growth in 2018 and 2019 respectively in terms of the Indian tourist traffic to Turkey. In this regard, the number of Indian tourists who preferred to visit Turkey in 2019 reached to 2.3 lakh which was an all-time record for Turkey tourism. Between January – March 2020, when air traffic was still acting in a normal way, we had 35 per cent increase in comparison to the same period of 2019. We believe that together with the resumption scheduled flights in India, the tourist traffic between our countries can reach similar numbers as we had in 2018 and 2019.
How important is the India market for you?
Turkey has some classical source markets in terms of tourism. In 2019, Russian Federation, Germany, United Kingdom, Iran, Poland and Ukraine were the main source markets for our tourism industry. However, one of the main goals of our tourism policy is the diversification of markets which contributes to overcoming of the seasonality issue in our tourism industry. In this regards we attach great importance to the countries called as emerging markets for our tourism industry. India is considered as one of the most potential emerging tourism markets for our country. Hence, we will continue to conduct different marketing activities in India in the years to come and will actively promote our country as a destination in India and strive for increasing the numbers of Indian tourists visiting Turkey.
