Seasonal dynamics of demand in major Turkish inbound tourism markets

Abstract

Tourism industry has a significant role in the Turkish economy, hence it has a prominent place in the economic policies and development plans since 1980s. This study aims to investigate the seasonal dynamics of major inbound tourism markets, namely the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Germany, the United Kingdom (UK), France and the Netherlands, in addition to the total tourism demand for Turkey using monthly series for the period 1985:01–2013:12. There are two approaches commonly employed to handle strong seasonality in literature. It is either filtered out by seasonal adjustment methods or incorporated by seasonal methods for analysis. Both methods are employed in this paper in a complementary manner in order to investigate the seasonal dynamics of the tourism markets. The results imply that the impact of any policy implemented would be temporary. Furthermore, seasonality is more likely a structural problem for the Turkish tourism industry, requiring decision-makers to take holistic approaches in developing strategies and policies for the tourism industry.