Official tourism data in a hotel feasibility study: which tables to use and how to cite them

Hotel feasibility study market data is official tourism statistics used to test demand, supply and spending assumptions for a proposed hotel. Use Ministry certified-facility arrivals, nights, length of stay and occupancy by province or district; rooms and beds by province; investment-certified rooms; border entries; TÜİK spending. Cite publisher, table and date.

A pre-feasibility report can look official and still miss the site. It quotes Türkiye arrivals while the proposed hotel sits in a district with different demand, supply and seasonality. After reading this you will know which official tables belong in a market chapter, which units they measure, how to cite each figure, and which assumptions no public table can carry.

What must a hotel feasibility market chapter show?#

It must show whether the site can attract enough guests, whether supply is already heavy, and how spending behaves by season. Public data can frame those tests; it cannot prove a project will work.

Start from the site, not the country. Before opening a single table, define the catchment, the room type, the season, the target segment and the certification path the property will follow. Then separate the four questions the chapter must answer: demand, supply, spending and seasonality. A single national total cannot answer all four, and a report that uses one number four times has not tested anything.

Use official tables to test a hypothesis you have already written down, then mark the gaps that need primary research. Every figure in the chapter should carry its publisher, table, period and definition. Keep units separate throughout: arrivals, overnight stays, nights per stay, rooms, beds and spending are not interchangeable, and mixing them is the most common way a market chapter goes wrong.

For the foundations of reading and citing these publications, see our guide to how to read and cite official tourism data.

Which Ministry tables measure demand near a site?#

Use the Ministry's certified accommodation bulletin for arrivals, overnight stays, average length of stay and occupancy rate in Ministry-certified facilities by province and district. It is closer to a hotel's market than national visitor totals.

The Ministry of Culture and Tourism's 2025 yearly bulletin of certified accommodation statistics covers facilities with an İşletme or Basit Konaklama certificate. Its province and district table gives facility arrivals, overnight stays, average length of stay and occupancy rate, each split into foreign and domestic guests, and separate sheets break the same figures down by facility type and class for Ankara, Antalya, Aydın, İstanbul, İzmir and Muğla. Use the district row when it exists: a province row can hide a weak district inside a strong market.

Source: Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2025 yearly bulletin of Ministry-certified accommodation statistics (2025).

Three cautions apply. First, the occupancy figure is an occupancy rate in Ministry-certified facilities, not a room-based measure and not a room rate; for what the number actually measures, see our article on what the Ministry occupancy figure measures. Second, do not call certified facilities hotels: label them by certification type, since the scope includes hotels, pensions, apart hotels and simple accommodation facilities. Third, compare only like with like: same year, same certification scope, same definition. Antalya, İstanbul and Muğla are useful benchmarks, but they are not substitutes for the site's own catchment.

Which tables show supply and pipeline?#

Use the Ministry's rooms and beds table for current certified stock, and the investment-certified line for pipeline scale. The table must be read with its date, because provisional counts move.

The Ministry's table of rooms and beds in Ministry-certified facilities, which it marks as provisional, gives facilities, rooms and beds by province, counting operation-certified (İşletme), investment-certified (Yatırım) and simple accommodation (Basit Konaklama) facilities together. Nationally it shows 1,939,125 beds in 928,638 rooms across 21,608 facilities (Ministry of Culture and Tourism, certified accommodation statistics, August 2026). Operation-certified facilities hold 596,643 rooms (Ministry, 2024 annual bulletin), a better proxy for operating supply than the all-certified total, because investment-certified facilities are not yet serving guests.

Source: Ministry of Culture and Tourism, September 2026 provisional table of certified facility rooms and beds; Ministry of Culture and Tourism, certified accommodation statistics, August 2026.

Investment-certified rooms show pipeline scale, not completion: a facility can hold an investment certificate for years before it opens. The August 2026 and September 2026 investment-certified lines differ, so state the date and do not mix them in one chapter. Beds and rooms are different units; do not convert one to the other without a published room count for the same scope. And do not mix the September 2026 stock table with end-2025 operating stock figures, because the definitions differ. For the wider picture of what exists at province level, see our guide to province-level tourism data in Türkiye.

How do spending tables differ from room rates?#

TÜİK spending per night is an average of what visitors spend, not the price of a room. It can support a spending context, but average daily rate needs competitor rates for the same room type, date and channel.

TÜİK's 2025 annual tourism bulletin, released 30 January 2026, reports that overnight visitors spent USD 100 per night on average, and its table of tourism income and average expenditure gives USD 99.95 per night for 2025. The figure covers all visitor spending, not just accommodation, and it is not tied to one hotel, district or room type. KPMG Türkiye's Turizm Sektörüne Bakış 2026, page 6, citing TÜİK, puts food and beverage at 21.1% and international transport at 12.8% of the spend structure, which shows how much of the average sits outside the room.

Use spending per night to ask whether a market has enough visitor spend to support the property's positioning, not to set a price. Keep the publisher, table and release date with the figure, because revisions change the number.

Which traps make a market chapter look precise but wrong?#

Most errors come from mixing definitions, treating a gate as a destination, or reading a provisional month as a trend. The fix is to label the table, period and unit before using the number.

Border arrivals are not destination demand. An entry gate such as İstanbul or Antalya can serve a different market than the hotel's district, and many visitors entering through one gate travel on to another region. TÜİK visitor totals and Ministry border arrivals also measure different events, so do not reconcile them by subtraction: TÜİK's 2025 departing-visitor count of 63,917,057 includes citizens resident abroad, while the Ministry's border count of foreign arrivals is a different series. Certified-facility arrivals, border nationality and visitor residence are three different views of the same season, not three estimates of one number.

The occupancy rate in Ministry-certified facilities is not a room-based measure, and some facility types can show unusual rates; do not invent an explanation where the definition is not published. Provisional tables can support a snapshot, not a trend: do not build a 2026 trend from provisional months. Where the supplied facts say 2026 is flat, describe it as flat, not as growth.

What does public data not prove, and what should a reader do next?#

Public data cannot prove competitor rates, segment mix, local event effects, channel behaviour or whether a specific project will work. The next step is a source table that links each assumption to data and primary research.

Competitor rates, room mix, cancellation behaviour and channel mix need primary research: rate shopping for the same dates, calls to comparable properties, and channel-level analysis. Local events, district-level seasonality and transport changes need local sources and interviews. No national table carries this weight, and a chapter that implies otherwise will not survive a lender's questions.

Development agency pre-feasibility reports are general guidance for a province-level idea, not site-specific proof. Agencies working under the coordination of the Ministry of Industry and Technology have published hotel investment pre-feasibility reports, for example a five-star hotel in Nevşehir (Ahiler Development Agency, February 2021), a boutique hotel in Mersin (Çukurova Development Agency, June 2021) and a five-star hotel in Çanakkale (Güney Marmara Development Agency, November 2021), all on the Ministry's investment support portal (opens in a new tab). Each report states that it serves as a basis for detailed feasibility studies and is prepared only for general guidance. The portal and the Kalkınma Kütüphanesi library can show the structure of such reports; they do not endorse a project.

For construction cost assumptions, use the official unit-cost discussion only as a reading guide, not as a cost assumption for one site; see how to read the official unit-cost table.

What to do next#

Build one assumption table. Each row carries a market claim, the official table behind it, the publisher, period, definition, the gap, and the primary research needed to close it. That single table turns scattered tourism statistics into a defensible feasibility chapter, and it shows a lender exactly which claims rest on public data and which rest on work still to be done.