Tourism in Turkey - Essay Example

Also, the industry provided employment to around 7% of total employed workers (estimated 1.8 million) either directly and/or indirectly. These people include transporters, artisans (who produce and sell traditional Turkish handicrafts), tour guides, airline(s) employees, commercial agencies, hotels’ and restaurants’ workers and others etc. In addition, the number of tourists in turkey has jumped from around 5 millions in 1990 to over 20 millions in 2005 which is mainly attributed to improvement in infrastructure, tourism regions and sites.

The growth rate of this industry remained over 10% in the recent years, despite the fact that economic meltdown and credit crises deteriorated the business outlook. More specifically, Hotel Industry has observed tremendous growth of nearly 6% per annum from 1998 to 2008 as the owners or groups have continuously expanded their bed capacities. The country has an intention to increase the tourists’ arrivals and revenues to 63 millions and US $86 billion respectively by 2023. Various new projects are in pipeline to hasten the development of tourist regions that will be discussed below.

(Eco Report, p.14), (Invest Support and Promotion Agency Report, pp. 4-9) and (Aslan, Kula and Kaplan, pp.66-67) The country enjoys the reputation of having culturally and historically rich places (its ancient civilization and archeological sites), enticing lakes as it has long (5,000 miles) coastline / sea shore, mountains, a relatively well-developed infrastructure and recent improvements, innovations and updating in hospitality. The major cities that have attracted more than 60% of tourists include Istanbul (federal capital), Ankara, Konya, Bursa, Adana and İzmir (‘with destinations such as Antalya Muğla and Aydın’).

As highlighted in Investment Support and Promotion’s report, Turkey is ‘surrounded by 3 different seas with