Domestic trips decrease by over 30 percent in Turkey amid pandemic

* Photo: Pexels (by Engin Akyurt), Graphs by TurkStat

The Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat), the state agency responsible for producing official statistics on Turkey, has released the "Household Domestic Tourism" data for the third quarter of 2020, which also covers the period of normalization in Turkey as of June amid the pandemic.

The report of the agency has shown that in the July-September 2020 period, 17 million 299 thousand residents had domestic trips.

Domestic trips with one or more than one overnights decreased by 32 percent compared to the same quarter of the previous year and declined to 21 million 724 thousand trips. In this quarter, domestic visitors made 255 million 77 thousand overnights. Average number of overnights was 11.7.

Primary purpose: Visiting relatives

According to the TurkStat report, the residents' primary purpose of trip was "visiting relatives" with 58.9 percent.

The secondary purpose of trip was "travel, leisure, vacation" with 35.7 percent and the third was "health" with 2.4 percent.

* Distribution of trips according to the purpose of trip

They stayed mostly at house of friends or relatives

In this quarter, according to the number of overnights by type of accommodation, domestic visitors stayed mostly at "house of friend or relative" with 150 million 856 thousand overnights.

While "own house" took second place with 75 million 760 thousand overnights, "hotel" took third place with 12 million 781 thousand overnights.

* Distribution of overnights according to the type of accommodation

Domestic visitors spent over 18 billion lira

In this quarter, trip expenditures of domestic tourists decreased by 19.2 percent compared to the same quarter of previous year and declined to 18 billion 864 million 514 thousand Turkish Lira (TRY).

In this quarter, while 92.2 percent of domestic tourism expenditure was individual with 17 billion 391 million 223 thousand TRY, 7.8 percent of it was package tour expenditures with 1 billion 473 million 291 thousand TRY. Average expenditure per trip was 868 TRY.

In this quarter, according to the rate of change of trip expenditures compared to the same quarter of the previous year, the highest decreases were package tour expenditures with 39.4 percent, trip expenditures made before trip with 33.7 percent and clothing and giftware expenditures with 31.4 percent respectively. (SD)