Tourism
Turkey was an important tourism destination for Israelis. Istanbul is a 90-minute flight from Tel Aviv. No visas are required for Israelis to visit Turkey, while Turkish citizens with ordinary passports need a visa prior to travelling Israel. In 2008, before the 2008-09 Gaza war, 560,000 Israelis vacationed in Turkey, according to Israeli tourism officials. In October 2010 Israel's Tourism Minister Stas Misezhnikov encouraged Israelis to boycott Turkey as a vacation spot in response to Turkey's stance on Gaza. The number of Israeli tourists in Turkey dropped to 300,000 in 2009 and to 110,000 in 2010; it declined further to about 62,000 between January and August 2011. According to Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Israelis' share of Turkey's total tourism declined from 3% to 0.05%. The number of Arab tourists in Turkey, by contrast, increased to about 1.4 million visitors in the first part of 2011, a jump from about 912,000 in the whole of 2009. Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stated in June 2012: "We do not need Israeli tourists. We have successfully filled their places".
Still, tourism to Antalya rose by more than 20% from September 2010 to September 2011, and the number of Israeli visitors to Istanbul rose 13%, still well below previous peaks.
Turkish Airlines dropped the number of weekly flights to Israel by about half in 2010. In 2011, Turkish charter airlines began to cut back weekly flights on routes to and from Israel against the backdrop of the crisis in relations between the two counties and the decline in Israelis' Turkey holidays. It also emerged that El Al Israel Airlines had contingency plans that would address the possibility that Turkey would bar the Israeli carrier from overflying Turkish territory.
Read more about this topic: Israeli-Turkish Relations
Famous quotes containing the word tourism:
“In the middle ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.”
—Robert Runcie (b. 1921)