Data released by the Culture and Tourism Ministry shows that the number of foreign tourists visiting Turkey increased by 6.1% in January 2025 when compared to January 2024, setting a new all-time record for January visitors.
Turkey looking to set new tourism records
According to the data released last week, a total of 2.17 million foreign visitors arrived at Turkish airports in the month of January 2025, setting a new all-time January record and another consecutive yearly peak.
This momentum follows the record-breaking tourism year of 2024, which saw a total of 52.6 million foreign tourist arrivals. When including Turkish nationals who live abroad and return to visit relatives, that number increases to a huge 62.2 million total visitors.
High arrivals and revenue targets for 2025
After the record-breaking year last year, the Turkish government has set high targets for the end of 2025. In 2025, the government estimates that 64 million visitors will arrive in Turkey, bringing $63.6 billion USD in total revenue with them.
In the year 2024, the total revenue from tourism amounted to $61.1 billion USD, which was an increase of 8.3% over the previous year of 2023, when a total of $54.3 billion USD tourism revenue was reported.
Tourism currently contributes around 10% of Turkey’s total gross domestic product (GDP) and accounts for almost 5% of total employment within the country.
Top nations visiting Turkey
In January this year, nationals from Iran were ranked as the top visitors to Turkey with 240,643 Iranians arriving to the country. This was followed by 203,733 Russian nationals visiting and 165,792 nationals from Bulgaria.
In 2024, a total of 6.7 million Russians travelled to Turkey, topping the list of visitors. In second place were German visitors amounting to 6.6 million people, and visitors from the United Kingdom amounting to 4.4 million people.
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