Turkey’s newly announced 2023 Tourism Strategy aims to make tourism one of the strategically significant sectors in Turkey, as the country switches to a sustainable and income-driven model in tourism.

According to the strategy, Turkey aims to target over 75 million tourists by 2023 and tourism income targeted is expected to be to the tunes of $65 billion.

The minister of culture and tourism, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy has revealed Turkey’s tourism strategy for 2023 at a press conference held on World Tourism Day. “Turkey is a world leader that offers a wide array of travel opportunities and that is able to meet the ever-changing expectations of today’s tourists. By putting new strategies into practice set forth in Tourism Strategy for 2023, we will ensure that Turkey will advance to the upper league in global tourism market with its tourist number and size of income. We are aiming that more than 75 million tourists will visit our country and reach an income of $65 billion in 2023.

“We are planning to realise that by increasing the average spending of a tourist and raising the number of average nights from 9.9 to 10 and thus reaching the average level of spending of $86 dollars per night.” 

Among other things the minister mentioned a desire to increase high-spend visitors and plans to develop new products for this market. Gastronomy will be a major focus of this redevelopment, actions will be taken to improve health tourism, there will be a focus on educational tourism to sports, faith tourism, third age target group, congress tourism, festivals and events and to cruise-yacht tourism.

The next promotional efforts will focus on markets that are currently sending large volumes of tourists to Turkey as well as the emerging Far East and Pacific markets; namely, China, India, South Korea, and Japan. Target scope will expand to include the developing Central and Eastern European markets, added the minister.

Turkey’s 2018-2023 estimations show an annual average growth of over 30 per cent in Asia-Pacific tourists. The Far Eastern and Oceanian regions are expected to send an approximate one million tourists in 2019, and another four million in 2023.