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"Hopefully, we will see that tourism activities will start again during the Ramadan Feast," Ersoy added.
The Ramadan Feast will be celebrated at the end of May.
Ersoy, who expects domestic holidaymakers to hit the roads first before foreign visitors, did not make any tourism revenue or visitor number predictions for 2020.
Turkey’s tourism revenues from international visitors reached $34.5bn last year.
Domestic tourism activity in Turkey is very likely to resume at the end of May after the Ramadan feast, Ersoy reiterated on April 18.
The tourism ministry has engaged in a project to map out and certify Turkish resorts that do not have confirmed virus cases, Ersoy, a hotel chain owner, noted.
Any tourist will believe in Erdogan’s corona-free certificates?
Turkey’s hotel occupancy rate nosedived to 28.6% in March from 64% a year ago.
In Istanbul, Turkey’s most popular tourist destination, the occupancy rate declined to 29% from 72% a year ago, while the average daily rate charged for a room dropped by 14.2% y/y to €65.8.
In Antalya, which is full of resorts on the Mediterranean coast particularly popular with German and Russian tourists, the March occupancy rate was 29%, roughly half of what it was in the same month last year. Antalya’s daily room rate fell 18% y/y to €39.
The official statistics office TUIK said on April 22 that domestic tourism expenditures rose 21.5% y/y in 2019 to Turkish lira (TRY) 48.9bn ($8.6bn).
9.1.7 ​Metallurgy & mining sector news
Turkey's crude steel production hit 5.9mn tonnes in January-February, rising 12.7% y/y​, data from a trade group showed.
The country's steel product export volume fell 4.9% y/y to 3.6mn tonnes in the first two months of this year, the Turkish Steel Producers' Association (TCUD) added.
Turkey’s revenues from steel exports stood at $2.5bn, down 9.6% on an annual basis.
Turkey’s steel imports posted a 40.4% annual rise, reaching 2.6mn tonnes in the first two months of the year. In terms of value, crude steel imports rose 16.3% on an annual basis to $1.8bn.
Turkey is the eighth largest crude steel producer worldwide.
Turkey was last year the top destination for waste exported from the EU​, data from Eurostat showed on April 16.
It received a volume of around 11.4mn tonnes, almost three times as much as it took in during 2004.
In August last year, Recep Kahraman, head of Turkey’s garbage pickers’ association, said Turkey was becoming Europe’s “dumping ground” for plastic
50​ TURKEY Country Report​ May 2020 ​ ​www.intellinews.com