Turkey’s tourism industry, a vital hard-currency earner for the country, is scrambling to boost tourist flows from Europe and the Middle East, desperate to minimize the damage it faces from the prospective loss of millions of Ukrainian and Russian holidaymakers this summer.

Tour operators hope to attract larger numbers of holidaymakers from European countries, chiefly Germany, and capitalize on Turkey’s recent fence-mending quest in the Middle East to lure more Arab and Israeli tourists, though few have illusions of fully compensating for the damage. Russians and Ukrainians accounted for some 23% of foreign visitors to Turkey last year. Russians were the largest group, numbering some 4.7 million, while about 2 million Ukrainians were the third-largest group after Germans. 

Reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic and the country’s own economic woes, Turkey’s tourism sector was hoping to rebound to pre-pandemic levels and generate at least $35 billion in revenues this year, up from $24.5 billion in 2021 and on par with its revenues in 2019 before the pandemic hit. Hard-currency revenues are crucial for Turkey’s ailing economy in the wake of the severe depreciation of the Turkish lira — the main driver of galloping inflation that hit 54.4% in February.

The Ukrainian market is considered all but lost this year due to the Russian invasion of the country, while the number of Russian tourists is expected to reach a mere 2 million at best amid a barrage of Western sanctions that have disrupted international air traffic and payment networks and hit the purchasing power of Russians. Since Turkey has not joined the sanctions, speculation has been rife on possible workarounds to circumvent bans affecting air travel and payment systems. Charter flights — the primary means of transporting Russian tourists to Turkey — remain the biggest problem, even as Turkish Airlines, the national flag carrier, has continued to fly to and from Russia.