The number of bookings by German tourists for tours to Turkey stopped sharply after the February earthquake. This information was provided by the German analytical agency Travel Data & Analytics (TDA). According to them, tourists “prefer to wait and see what happens.” All the more so because the forecasts regarding seismic safety, voiced, in particular, by German scientists, inspire fear. In addition, the problem of refugees, who are currently housed in hotels in Antalya and other resorts in Turkey, also played a role.
Note. The forecast of a mega-earthquake, which should occur in the coming days, fueled the fears of tourists even more. Read more in the article “Ominous signal: many resorts and cities may be destroyed by a mega-earthquake in March.”
According to the experts of the analytical agency Travel Data & Analytics (TDA), until the beginning of February, bookings were active, and from the point of view of cash flow, the number of bookings made in Germany in January exceeded the level of 2019, but the lag remained in terms of the number of tourists. This was also explained by the increased prices. At the same time, the eastern Mediterranean, primarily Turkey, as well as Greece and Egypt accounted for up to 40% of bookings, with Turkey showing rapid growth, overtaking even the “pre-spring” level.
However, after the earthquake, the reservations “stood up”, experts emphasized. “The number of holiday bookings in the Eastern Mediterranean region has generally decreased. Tourists prefer to wait and see what will happen in this area,” experts said.
There are two expected reasons for this. First, tourists are scared both by the earthquake itself and by many predictions that this is not the end of the “seismic tension” and that the resorts are under threat. This was also confirmed by the recent earthquake in the resort province of Izmir. On Monday evening, an earthquake was recorded in the Aegean Sea near the resort province. The magnitude was much smaller than the catastrophic earthquakes of early February — only 4.1. But this was enough for residents and tourists to run out into the street in panic.
We will also remind you that it was German scientists who assumed that Istanbul could also be in the zone of natural disasters. The fact that the “cultural capital” of Turkey is in a zone of extremely high seismic risk, and there is not much time left before a terrible disaster in Turkey, said German scientists from the German Center for Geological Research (GFZ) in Potsdam, who called the dates of a new probable earthquake in Istanbul. . Marco Bonhoff from the German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam is confident that the next big earthquake is just around the corner, and it will most likely happen in the Istanbul area. “Although the situation in Istanbul has not changed due to the recent aftershocks in the southeast, the risk to the metropolis, in general, is as high as in the affected region so far. The average recurrence period of a strong earthquake in Istanbul is 250 years, and the last major earthquake occurred in 1766, so the next one is long overdue,” explained the German expert. Forecasting within a year is difficult, but there is a very high probability that the Istanbul area will be at risk of a major earthquake in the next few years or decades.
The second reason also related to the earthquake is the problem of refugees. As some experts assure, tourists will not want to live for their money in the same hotels that host the victims. And what’s more, they are unlikely to settle in the hotel even immediately after they prepare for the season by making at least some cosmetic repairs. By the way, in Russia, experts also cited this reason as one of the reasons for the decline in Turkey’s sales. Thus, in mid-February, a statement was made that sales of tours to Turkey in Russia had already fallen by 25%: this was told to Kommersant by tourism retail experts. At the same time, tour operators cited as one of the main reasons for this – the fear of tourists that they will have to “share hotels with refugees”, who were sheltered by hotels after the earthquake.
Spain can still win over the Germans due to all these circumstances. According to another analytical agency Reyseanalyse, at least 13% of Germans chose this direction, another 11% planned Italy, and 6% – Greece.