New source market or one good year? Testing Poland and India in the Ministry's data

A new source market is a country whose visitors keep rising, travel in your weak months and sleep in certified facilities, not just cross the border. Test it with five checks on the Ministry's 2025 border and accommodation bulletins: three years of growth, monthly spread, entry gate, facility nights, and your own enquiries.

A tour operator mentions a new market at a trade fair, and by the afternoon three people have repeated it as fact. The Ministry publishes a file that can settle most of it, if you read four of its tables in the right order. This article runs two emerging source markets in Türkiye, Poland and India, through the full test sheet, so you can run your own candidate the same way before the next budget meeting.

What can the Ministry's tables settle that a trade fair rumor cannot?#

They can tell you whether a country's arrivals are rising across several years, which months those arrivals fall in, and whether the visitors sleep in certified facilities. They cannot tell you whether those travelers will choose your hotel.

Two bulletins, two counting frames. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism's yearly border statistics bulletin (opens in a new tab) counts entries at the border by nationality. The yearly accommodation bulletin (opens in a new tab) counts arrivals and overnight stays in Ministry-certified (İşletme and Basit) facilities by country of residence. Neither is a customer list.

Border arrivals count a person each time they enter the country; facility arrivals count a stay. One traveler who enters twice, or who sleeps in two properties, appears differently in each file. The border bulletin is a single spreadsheet with several tables: Table C for 2010 to 2025, Table 6 for 2023 to 2025 and Table 7 for months within 2025. Download the file once and keep it with its year, because next year's file replaces it.

What the tables cannot do: no forecast, no spend per visitor by nationality, no hotel-level detail, and no reason for the trip. Business travel and a family holiday look identical in the column. Start from the Türkiye tourism market overview for the wider picture, then come back to the tables for the specific country you are testing.

Test 1: has the country risen for three years, or for one?#

Poland has risen every year since 2020 and is now well above its 2019 level. India rose once, in 2024, and fell back in 2025. That gap is exactly what the test is built to catch.

Poland, Table C: 428,275 arrivals in 2010, 880,839 in 2019, 145,908 in 2020, 585,076 in 2021, 1,135,903 in 2022, then 1,539,123 in 2023, 1,866,986 in 2024 (+21.30%) and 1,914,958 in 2025 (+2.57%, 3.63% of foreign visitors). India, Table C: 63,406 in 2010, 230,131 in 2019, 44,707 in 2020, 52,651 in 2021, 231,579 in 2022, 274,159 in 2023, 330,985 in 2024 (+20.73%) and 250,751 in 2025 (-24.24%, 0.48% of foreign visitors). All figures are from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's 2025 yearly border statistics bulletin, Tables C and 6.

Source: Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2025 yearly border statistics bulletin, Table C (2010-2025) and Table 6 (2023-2025).

The rule: a market passes when arrivals rise in at least three consecutive years and the latest year is clearly above 2019. Poland passes both. India is barely above 2019 in 2025 and its direction reversed, so it fails.

Always compare with 2019, not only year on year. 2021 and 2022 are recovery from a collapsed base, and growth off a small base flatters every market in the file. Read the second step, not just the sign: Poland's growth slowed from +21.30% to +2.57% while still rising. A market can be maturing rather than collapsing, and the two call for different budgets.

The table records what happened. It does not project, and neither should your business case: no figure here is a promise for next year.

Test 2: which months does the market travel, and are they your empty months?#

Polish arrivals in 2025 ran from 21,688 in January to 329,179 in July. Indian arrivals ran from 15,015 in January to 31,659 in May, a far flatter year.

Poland's curve is a summer curve. It adds volume to the months a coastal hotel already sells and does almost nothing for January, February or November. India's spread is narrow: its peak month is about twice its weakest month, against roughly fifteen times for Poland, computed from the peak and low figures above. A small market with a flat curve can still fill shoulder months.

Source: Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2025 yearly border statistics bulletin, Table 7.

The method: take Table 7, divide each month by the country's annual total, and lay that share over your own occupancy by month. A market is worth a campaign when its share of your weak months is above its annual share.

Watch the base. India's May peak of 31,659 is 12.6% of its 250,751 annual arrivals; ten extra rooms a night is invisible in the national table and decisive for one hotel. Ask about the calendar, not the stereotype: school holidays, religious holidays and long weekends in the source country drive the curve, and they move between years. A monthly pattern from one year is a shape, not a schedule. Re-read the table each year before you repeat the campaign.

Test 3: which gate does the market enter, and how far is that from your hotel?#

The border bulletin breaks arrivals down by entry point, and an entry gate is not a destination: a guest who lands in İstanbul may sleep in Antalya, and the reverse happens too.

Read the gate tables for your target nationality before anything else. The same country can shift gates between years as air routes open and close. For scale only: foreign arrivals in 2025 by entry were 18,972,699 through İstanbul (35.95%) and 16,007,580 through Antalya (30.33%), Ministry yearly border bulletin 2025. These are totals for all foreign arrivals, not for Poland or India, and must never be attributed to a single market.

If the gate split for your market is not published or not readable in the file, treat the gate as unknown and use your own enquiry data instead: the airport a guest names, the transfer they ask for, the postcode on the booking. Distance costs twice: transfer time for the guest, and the cost of any sales presence at that gate, whether a trade event, a representative or a partner agency. A market that enters through a gate several hundred kilometers away is not local demand. It is a different distribution problem with a different budget. Regional nationality figures show how source markets differ by region: Antalya, Muğla and İstanbul, which is often more useful than the national total.

Test 4: does the market show up in facility nights?#

Poland does: guests resident in Poland spent 9,001,913 nights in certified facilities in 2025. India barely does: 560,251 nights, 0.22% of all overnight stays.

Poland by residence: 1,842,143 arrivals and 6,690,108 nights in 2023; 2,288,082 and 7,918,509 in 2024; 2,551,389 and 9,001,913 in 2025. The 2025 nights were 5.82% of nights by guests resident abroad and 3.57% of all overnight stays. India by residence: 281,865 and 627,824 in 2023; 340,564 and 759,021 in 2024; 250,940 and 560,251 in 2025. The 2025 nights were 0.36% of nights by guests resident abroad and 0.22% of all overnight stays. All from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's 2025 yearly accommodation statistics bulletin, sheet by country of residence.

Source: Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2025 yearly accommodation statistics bulletin, sheet by country of residence.

Divide nights by arrivals to get length of stay in facilities: about 3.5 nights for Poland and about 2.2 for India in 2025, arithmetic on the two published columns. Length of stay decides what an arrival is worth to you.

Nationality is not residence. Border arrivals for Poland (1,914,958, by nationality) are lower than facility arrivals for Poland-resident guests (2,551,389). The files count different things, and this article does not reconcile them; why nationality and residence give different source market rankings is worth a separate read.

The share test is the sharpest one: compare the market's share of foreign arrivals with its share of foreign nights. India's night share (0.36%) sits below its arrival share (0.48%); Poland's night share (5.82%) sits above its arrival share (3.63%). Certified facilities include pansiyon, apart and butik properties as well as hotels, so the bulletin is not a hotel-only count. Do not describe it as hotel occupancy.

Test 5: what do your own enquiries and past stays say?#

The national table says a market exists somewhere in the country. Only your own records say whether it books you, at what rate and through which channel.

Pull three years of past stays by country of residence from your system, not by the nationality typed at check-in, and count nights and revenue, not only room nights. Count enquiries that did not convert and record the reason. A market with many enquiries and few bookings has a channel or price problem, not a demand problem.

Set one segment code per market and apply it at booking, not at check-in, so the country survives into your reports instead of dissolving into a general bucket; how to set up segment codes is a short piece of setup work that pays for itself here. Break the market down by channel: direct, tour operator, online agency. A market that arrives through one channel only hands that channel the pricing power.

Check cancellation and no-show rates by market before you scale spend. A market with heavy washing out is expensive to serve even when it books. Small numbers are noise: three bookings from a country in a year is an anecdote, and it is how most market decisions start.

What does a new market cost before it pays?#

A new market costs language, content, channel access and contract work before the first booking arrives, and those costs are paid in attention as much as in money.

Language: check which languages your website, booking engine, confirmation emails and in-room material actually cover. A market whose language you cannot serve is a market you serve in English, and that is a decision, not an accident. Content: room descriptions, cancellation terms, payment methods and the local-language pages that search engines index. Content is the cheapest part of entry and the part most often skipped.

Channel: in some markets a wholesaler or tour operator controls access; in others direct booking dominates. Find out which before you build a direct campaign into a market you cannot reach. Contract: allotment, release periods, payment terms and who carries the risk of unsold rooms. A generous allotment in a market you have not tested is inventory you have given away.

Operations: breakfast, front desk hours, the documents you need at check-in, and whether anyone on the team can greet the guest in their own language. Baseline: record your current share from the market before you spend anything, so the result can be compared with something. A campaign without a baseline cannot be judged.

No stereotypes. Ask the market's travel trade what it needs instead of assuming from a nationality, and write the answers down for the next person. For the wider picture of where Türkiye's demand comes from, see Türkiye tourism source markets 2025.

What to do next#

Download the two 2025 bulletins from the Ministry's statistics pages, pick one candidate market, and run the five tests in order: three years of growth against 2019, monthly spread against your weak months, entry gate against your transfer radius, facility nights against foreign arrivals, and your own enquiry log. Poland passes the trend test and the nights test and fails the shoulder-month test; India passes the month test and fails the trend test in 2025. Record your baseline before you spend, and re-read the file next year, because the table only ever tells you what already happened.