Citizens resident abroad in Türkiye’s tourism data: the visitors counted next to foreigners

Citizens resident abroad are people with Turkish citizenship whose usual home is outside Türkiye. TÜİK counted 63,917,057 departing visitors in 2025, of whom 17.5% (11,175,394) were citizens resident abroad, per its Tourism Statistics annual release of 30 January 2026. They appear in total visitor numbers, not in foreign visitor numbers.

A resort hotel fills in August, and the channel reports do not explain it: rooms booked by phone, three nights at a time, by guests who arrive from abroad but speak Turkish at the desk. The statistics have a name for that guest, and it is not "foreign visitor". This article explains who is counted as a citizen resident abroad in Türkiye's tourism statistics, how the two publishers count the group differently, what TÜİK's separate averages say about spend and length of stay, and how to check your own booking data for this demand.

Who counts as a citizen resident abroad in Türkiye's tourism statistics?#

A citizen resident abroad is a person with Turkish citizenship whose usual place of residence is outside Türkiye. In the statistics this person is a visitor like any other, counted in the total but not in the foreign visitor count.

The definition turns on residence, not citizenship alone. A Turkish citizen who moved to Germany years ago is in this group. A German citizen of Turkish origin arriving from Berlin is a foreign visitor. And a citizen resident in Türkiye who returns from a holiday abroad is not a visitor to Türkiye at all, and never enters these counts.

The everyday word is "gurbetçi". The statistics and this article use "citizens resident abroad" (yurt dışında ikamet eden vatandaşlar), and the formal term is the safer one in reports.

Both publishers include the group: TÜİK inside departing visitors, the Ministry inside border arrivals. Neither treats it as a footnote. The size is not marginal: 17.5% of departing visitors in TÜİK's 2025 release, roughly one visitor in six.

A hotelier should care because the group differs from foreign visitors on length of stay and nightly spend, and differs from domestic guests on timing and booking channel. A report that files these guests as domestic, or as foreign, hides both differences.

Why do total visitors and foreign visitors differ?#

Because the total adds citizens resident abroad to foreign visitors. The gap between the two headline numbers is that group, not a rounding difference.

The Ministry's 2025 yearly border bulletin shows the arithmetic directly: 52,775,055 foreign visitors plus 11,166,206 citizens resident abroad gives 63,941,261 total visitors. TÜİK's annual release of 30 January 2026 counted 63,917,057 departing visitors, of whom 17.5% (11,175,394) were citizens resident abroad.

Source: TÜİK, Tourism Statistics 2025 (30 Jan 2026). Source: Ministry of Culture and Tourism, border statistics yearly bulletin 2025.

The two totals sit close together but are not the same measurement: one counts arrivals at the border, the other counts departing visitors in TÜİK's survey. Neither publisher explains the remaining gap beyond that, so do not merge them, average them or present the difference as a finding. For more on which count answers which question, see Türkiye visitor numbers 2025: total or foreign visitors?.

Choose the count that matches your question. Source-market ranking and competitor-set comparisons use foreign visitors; total demand including diaspora travel uses total visitors. The 17.5% share belongs to TÜİK's release, so do not apply it to the Ministry total as though the Ministry had published it. If a supplier or a consultant quotes one total and calls it the other, ask which publisher and which release before it reaches a board paper.

How does the Ministry estimate citizens resident abroad?#

It estimates how many Turkish citizens actually live in Türkiye, then subtracts that estimate from every citizen who enters at the border. What remains is the citizens resident abroad count.

The Ministry's own metadata for the border statistics (opens in a new tab) (last updated 23.12.2024) describes the mechanism: resident citizens are estimated through TÜİK's Citizen Residence Survey (Vatandaş İkamet Tespit Anketi), and that estimate is subtracted from all citizens entering at the border. If you need the method in writing, cite that page rather than a news article that summarizes it.

Why a subtraction rather than a count? A passport scan records citizenship, not where a person lives. No border system holds a residence field, so the split has to be modelled.

The same method produces the monthly border bulletin; the yearly bulletin is the twelve months added together, which is why the two always agree with each other. Use the figure for shape and share, not for precision at the margin. For your own decisions, your booking data is the sharper instrument. The border statistics themselves are explained in How Türkiye counts its tourists: the border statistics explained.

What do citizens resident abroad spend, and how long do they stay?#

In 2025 they spent USD 1,036 per person and USD 64 per night, and stayed 16.09 nights on average, against USD 1,008 per person, USD 100 per night and 10.66 nights for all departing visitors.

These figures come from TÜİK's Tourism Statistics annual release (opens in a new tab) of 30 January 2026. TÜİK publishes separate averages for this group and for no other visitor group. There is no separate average for foreign visitors, so a comparison of "citizens resident abroad against foreigners" cannot be built from the release.

Source: TÜİK, Tourism Statistics, Q4 and annual 2025, 30 January 2026. Tourism income attributed to citizens resident abroad in the same release: USD 11,580,096 thousand, as printed.

Read the two averages together. The per-person figure is above the all-visitor average because the trip is long; the per-night figure is far below it because most of those nights are not paid accommodation. The per-night figure covers every night of the trip, including nights spent in a family home. It is not a room rate and cannot be compared with your average daily rate.

Do not derive anything further: no nightly figure of your own, no per-day conversion, no percentage of revenue. TÜİK's 10.66 is nights, is written as 10.66, and is never rounded to 10.7 or called days. What the pair does tell you is that the paid slice of these trips is small, and it is concentrated in a few nights around an event. For how the per-visitor figures are built, see How much do visitors spend in Türkiye? Reading TÜİK's per-visitor figures.

Why do they come, and when?#

Mostly to see family. Visiting relatives and friends was the leading purpose for 63.4% of citizens resident abroad in 2025, against 67.7% of all departing visitors who named travel, entertainment, sportive or cultural activities.

The purpose table in TÜİK's release of 30 January 2026 puts 7,088,902 of the 11,175,394 citizens resident abroad under visiting relatives and friends, and 3,328,558 under travel, entertainment, sportive or cultural activities. Read the two lines together: the group is not mainly a leisure-hotel market, but roughly a third of it is, and that third is the part a hotel can sell to.

Timing follows family life rather than the tourism calendar: school holidays, weddings, ceremonies and religious holidays. Religious holidays fall earlier each year on the Gregorian calendar, so a peak that lands in July one year can land in June the next. Compare the same month across years, not two adjacent months. The monthly border bulletin is where the shape of the year is visible; do not state a monthly figure unless the bulletin is in front of you.

A practical check: overlay your own July and August bookings with the religious holiday dates of the last three years and see whether the peaks move with them. The same month-by-month reading applies to the main source markets, as covered in Russia, Germany and the UK month by month: when Türkiye's top source markets travel.

What does this mean for a hotel's summer and holiday demand?#

Expect short paid stays inside long family trips: a few hotel nights booked around an event, with the rest of the visit spent in private homes.

The pattern follows from the averages: 16.09 nights in the country, USD 64 a night, most nights unpaid. Your hotel sees the paid slice, not the trip. Demand triggers are events, not seasons: weddings, engagement and circumcision ceremonies, family reunions, graduations, and the days around a religious holiday.

Check whether your OTA reports and your direct bookings tell the same story about this group, because reservations often arrive by phone, by messaging app, through a relative in Türkiye, or at the desk. Keep a residence-country field separate from the nationality field in your guest records. Without it, a citizen resident abroad is filed as domestic and disappears from your foreign mix.

Do not borrow market language: the Ministry publishes an occupancy rate for Ministry-certified facilities, not "hotel occupancy", and the definition behind it is not stated in the release. And this is an argument about the shape of demand, not a forecast. Nothing in these figures predicts 2026, which is flat.

How do you cite these figures without mixing them up?#

Name the publisher, the release and the date inside the sentence, and say which count you are quoting.

Use the two source lines verbatim: "Source: TÜİK, Tourism Statistics 2025 (30 Jan 2026)" and "Source: Ministry of Culture and Tourism, border statistics yearly bulletin 2025". Close any passage that uses these numbers with the house line: "Public data. No endorsement implied."

Never merge the TÜİK and Ministry totals, never average them, and never present their difference as a finding. Neither publisher explains it beyond departures versus arrivals. Border bulletins may carry a provisional label; keep any provisional label a release carries and do not add one it does not.

2025 growth is 2025 growth. Do not carry it into 2026, and do not add quarters together to manufacture a year-to-date change. Never turn the per-night spend into a room rate, or the visitor count into a count of hotel guests: the statistics do not tell you how many of these visitors slept in a certified facility.

What to do next#

Pull the residence-country field, not the nationality field, out of last July and August and compare the two. If they disagree, you have diaspora demand that your reports have been filing as domestic or as foreign, and the published figures above explain why it looks the way it does. The public numbers used here are collected on ai-otel.com/turkiye.