2016 Türkiye Turizm Krizi Üzerine Bir İnceleme

Abstract

Tourism is a global business and tourist markets are highly susceptible to external factors. Tourism demand is highly elastic since it involves luxury consumption. Therefore, triggering events including natural disasters, outbreaks, economic crises, terror, political instability and war cause significant and unforeseeable fluctuations in international tourist arrivals and tourism receipts. In accordance with the importance of tourism in the economy of the receiving country, significant drops are referred to as tourism crises. The gravity, duration and geographical spread depend on the type, dimension, repetition and persistence of the triggering events as well as media attention, but are difficult to foresee. Establishments and destinations should acknowledge crisis as a natural part of the process, take immediate precautions to adapt to change and implement pro-active planning. This paper aims to analyse the effect of triggering events on 2016 tourism crisis in Turkey in comparison with the relevant literature and similar examples. In 2016, Turkish tourism suffered its gravest tourism crisis in its history, as a result of a series of triggering events that started as early as 2014, including civil war in a neighbouring country, refugee issues, terror attacks, attempted coup, strained external relations with important tourist generating countries and travel advisories. Turkish tourism lost one fourth of its tourist arrivals and one third of its tourism receipts, but expressed a significant resilience and recovered by 2018 in terms of tourist arrivals, as a result of restored external affairs and internal security. Regional and Turkish arrivals seemed less affected by the crisis. However, indicators including tourism receipts, market share in international tourism and tourism investments have not recovered from the crisis by the end of 2018. Reactional price reductions caused market pressure and further reduced income per tourist.