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The invasion of Ukraine dealt a new blow to the Turkish economy, which is heavily dependent on both countries for its tourism revenues.
Desperate, local travel agencies say they are preparing for big losses; the pace of bookings has slowed significantly ahead of the vital summer season for this industry, which has not yet managed to recover properly from the coronavirus pandemic.
Ismail Yitmen: Travel agencies working with Russia are suffering a lot from this situation. My agency too. Given the level of deposits I have paid on hotels, my losses so far exceed 11,000 euros. If other groups are canceled, along with our staff, offices and other expenses, in total I say we will go to 60,000-70,000 euros loss.
About 4 million Russians visited Turkey last year, while the number of Ukrainian tourists exceeded 1.5 million.
Thesmail Yitmen: It was a large group planned to come to Turkey for two months, but we could not get the money from them because transfers with SWIFT were stopped. I lost money from this thing. It is not known when the others will come. The cancellations of tourist groups are hitting us very hard.
Firuz Ballıkaya: Not only from Ukraine and Russia, but bookings from all over Europe have been significantly reduced. We all wish the situation to improve as soon as possible, because if we continue like this, we have a bad job.
Normally, according to Ballikaya, summer bookings should have flown in right now in March, but demand has stopped abruptly. NATO member Ankara sided with the West, strongly condemning the Russian occupation of Ukraine, despite its close ties to Putin. However, it has chosen not to close its airspace to Russian aircraft.
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