The mood among the providers of travel to Turkey could not be better.

"The corks are popping," says Deniz Ugur, Managing Director at Bentour, one of the leading organizers.

He speaks of record incoming bookings.

If you want to travel now, you still have money and vacation days from the previous year, he says.

Quite a few booked twice: first for the summer and then a second trip for the fall.

That is why Turkey, along with Spain and the Greek islands, is one of the first tourist destinations to regain momentum.

The three Mediterranean countries benefit from the fact that many vacationers are not yet ready for long-distance flights.

Rainer Hermann

Editor in politics.

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    Despite all the euphoria, tourism in Turkey will not return to the level of 2019 this year. The Ministry of Tourism in Ankara expects the number of holidaymakers to double to 30 million compared to 2020. In 2019, however, 45 million vacationers had chosen Turkey, they brought 35 billion dollars into the country. Last year that number had dropped to a third.

    The upswing should not fail this year due to the pandemic.

    The government started a special vaccination campaign in the tourist areas early on in order to keep the incidences stable and low.

    In addition, Turkey can build on the fact that it was one of the first major holiday destinations to develop a comprehensive concept of measures and hygiene for tourism last year.

    But the first four months were a lost time - no one traveled to Turkey either.

    A tariff without cancellation costs

    That changed in one fell swoop in mid-May, says Ugur. In weeks in which in 2019, the last normal tourism year, 400 new bookings were received per day, there were now more than 1000, sometimes even 1600. He also attributes the popularity to the fact that every second guest books a flex rate, i.e. up to 14 days can withdraw from the trip before departure without cancellation costs. In the greater Antalya region, 95 percent of the hotels have already reopened. More than half of them were closed last summer. In order to at least compensate for the loss until mid-May, the season is to be extended to the end of November this year.

    The Russian holidaymakers made the start this year.

    For them, Turkey is one of the few vacation destinations that they can reach without a visa.

    They are the largest group: in 2019 with seven million, last year with only 2.1 million.

    It was a threat to Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan's address when Russian President Vladimir Putin banned all flights to Turkey on April 1.

    The ban was finally lifted on June 22nd.

    On the very first day, 44 Russian planes with 12,000 vacationers landed in Antalya.

    Traveling to Turkey has become easier

    The holidaymakers from Russia and Germany currently each make up almost a third of the guests in the greater Antalya area. Ugur expects that the German share will increase. The charter airline Sunexpress has announced that it will offer 75 additional flights from Germany to Turkey in July. It benefits from the fact that after the dissolution of the subsidiary Sunexpress Germany a year ago, it took over its aircraft and its slots.

    The trip to Turkey and the return to Germany have been easier since June 6th, when the Robert Koch Institute classified the country as an easy risk area.

    Turkey itself largely conforms to the norms applicable in Europe when it comes to entry and exit regulations.

    Ugur rules out that the tourist regions could again become high-incidence areas with more than 200 newly infected people per 100,000 inhabitants.

    The successful vaccination campaign in these regions speaks against this.

    The boss of Antalya Airport, Bilgihan Yilmaz, could be right.

    He has forecast that the number of passengers at his airport will double, if not triple, this year.

    That would also please Frankfurt, because Fraport AG operates Turkey's second largest airport.