Mardaan Palace

A new statement released by the Turkish Touristic Hotels and Investors Association (TUROB) has revealed that hotel reservations in Turkey are on the decline due to conflicts in neighbouring countries and domestic issues.

The statement noted: "Conflicts in the Middle East and social unrest across Turkey negatively affect the Turkish tourism sector.

"Specifically, the Kobane protests in October cost more than €13m to the sector, as revealed by the STR Global October 2014 Report."

"The Kobane protests in October cost more than €13m to the sector."

According to the report, Turkey had the second-lowest hotel occupancy rate in Europe at 63.8% in October, which is ahead of only Israel.

Last month, Malta reported 89.6% occupancy and is said to have topped the list of highest hotel occupancy rates in Europe, reported hurriyetdailynews.com.

In October, occupancy rates in Istanbul’s hotels reached 67.6%, representing a 0.6% rise compared with the same month in 2013.

In the first ten months of 2014, occupancy rates in the city’s hotels declined to 65.8%, from 67.8% over the same period last year.

The Mediterranean city of Antalya witnessed a decline of 59.1% in hotel occupancy rates in October, which represents a fall of 6.5% from the same month of the previous year.


Image: Exterior of Mardan Palace hotel in Antalya, Turkey. Photo: courtsey of Ender Yildirim licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 at Wikipedia.