Source markets differ by region: nationality figures for Antalya, Muğla and İstanbul

Nationality by region comes from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's yearly border statistics bulletin, Table 8, which crosses each nationality with the border gate visitors used, and totals those gates by province. Provincial directorates add monthly tables. All of it counts entries, not stays, so read it beside your own guest mix.

A revenue manager in Belek opens the national source-market ranking and reads Russia first, Germany second. In the hotel's lobby that same week the loudest language is Polish. Both statements are true, and the distance between them is a data question, not a coincidence. After reading this you will know where the Ministry publishes Antalya tourists by nationality and gate, what the provincial directorates in Muğla and İstanbul add, why the numbers disagree, and how to set the official table beside your own guest mix.

Why is the national ranking the wrong start for one hotel?#

Because a national total adds every gate and every province into one figure, and your hotel sells in one of them. The ranking measures the size of a market in Türkiye, not the size of that market at your door.

The same source market appears at three different sizes depending on the gate. In the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's 2025 yearly border statistics bulletin, Table 8 counts 4,044,482 Russian nationals at Antalya's gates, 2,022,246 at İstanbul's and 412,661 at Muğla's. The mix differs by type of trip, not only by geography: Antalya's gates lean on Russia, Germany, the UK and Poland; Muğla's on the UK; İstanbul's on Russia, Germany and the United States.

The consequences are operational, not academic. Language cover at reception, which agency contracts you renew, where a sales trip goes, which school-holiday calendar you plan the season around: each of these follows the mix at your gate, not the national table. A market that sits outside the national top five can still be your second-largest group, and a national top-three market can be almost absent from your province's gates.

Start from the province table, then narrow to your own registration data. Starting from the national top ten and working down is how hotels end up hiring for a language their gate data does not support. Keep the year in view as well: 2026 is flat overall, with H1 visitors at 25,758,545, down 2.39% (Ministry of Culture and Tourism, August 2026 bulletin), so a single province's single-month movement is a reading, not a trend. For the wider picture of which figure means what, see our guide to province-level tourism data in Türkiye and how to read it.

Where does the Ministry publish visitors by nationality and border gate?#

In the yearly border statistics bulletin, Table 8, titled foreign visitors by nationality and border gate. It gives each nationality's arrivals at every gate, plus a total for the province each gate belongs to.

Table 8 covers foreign visitors for a full year. Table 11 repeats the breakdown for foreign same-day visitors, who should not be added to overnight visitors in the same total. Tables 4 and 5 in the same bulletin break arrivals down by the gate's province and transport mode, and by gate and month, but without nationality. Use them for seasonality, not for market mix.

Read the individual gate rows first, then the province total row. The total includes gates you may not picture, such as seaports and secondary airports. The bulletin is published yearly by the Ministry's General Directorate of Investment and Enterprises, and border bulletins are marked provisional, so treat the figures as open to revision. The table counts entries: a visitor who enters the country twice in a year appears twice, so the figures are not a count of people. If you reproduce the table, decide deliberately whether to name politically sensitive markets. The ranking works without them, and grouping them costs the reader nothing.

Source: Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2025 yearly border statistics bulletin, Table 8. Public data. No endorsement implied.

Poland also appears at Antalya's gates with 1,280,020 arrivals, fourth there. Every figure counts entries, not stays.

What do the provincial directorates publish, and how often?#

It varies by province, and that variation is the point: Muğla and İstanbul publish monthly tables, other provinces publish less or nothing, so check your own directorate's page before assuming a series exists.

Muğla's Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism publishes two monthly Excel sets under its monthly statistics heading: one by nationality and month, one by nationality and gate, covering Dalaman, Milas-Bodrum and the province's ports, with files for January to September 2026 posted. Muğla compiles those figures from the police passport branch, airport ground-handling organisations and harbour masters, so they are a local count, not a copy of the Ministry's national bulletin.

İstanbul's Provincial Directorate publishes a monthly tourism statistics report as a PDF and a Word file, prepared by its strategy development branch from the Ministry's border, accommodation and facility statistics. Its September 2026 report states that 1,905,497 foreign visitors entered through İstanbul's border gates that month, 6.41% more than in September 2025: one month, one province, and not a description of the year. For Antalya, the route we could verify is the Ministry's Table 8 gate rows; check the Antalya directorate's own site for a monthly table before you rely on one.

The accommodation bulletins are a different instrument: they report arrivals and nights with a foreign and domestic split, and do not give nationality. Do not use them to answer a nationality question.

Is a border gate the same as a destination?#

No. The Ministry's table records where a visitor entered Türkiye, not where that visitor stayed, so a gate's nationality mix is evidence about arrivals, never about beds sold in that province.

Antalya's gates serve Belek, Side, Kemer, Lara and Alanya, and a visitor counted at the airport may sleep far from it, in this province or another. İstanbul's gate total includes its airports and its seaports, so a cruise passenger and an air passenger both appear as one entry. Muğla's gates are Dalaman, Milas-Bodrum and the ports, and Dalaman also serves hotels in neighbouring provinces.

The error runs both ways. A hotel near a provincial border may draw guests who entered through another province's gate, so its own mix will never match the gate table exactly. Use the gate table for market size and direction, and your own registration data for what you actually sold. Never present a gate figure as a province's guest count, and never subtract one province's gate total from another to estimate movement inside the country.

Why do the provincial and Ministry totals for the same province differ?#

Because they are different measurements taken by different bodies: Muğla's directorate counts entries through the province's gates from local sources and includes Turkish citizens, while the Ministry's Table 8 counts foreign arrivals only.

A provincial directorate's figures and the Ministry's border statistics often count different things: the directorate's total can include Turkish citizens resident in Türkiye alongside foreign visitors, while the Ministry's border table counts foreign arrivals only. The Ministry's Table 8 reports 3,492,746 foreign arrivals at Muğla's gates for the whole of 2025. Before you compare a directorate figure with a border figure, check whether the two are the same measure.

The periods differ as well: nine months of 2026 against a full 2025. Comparing them without saying so produces a false decline. The compilers differ too: locally, the police passport branch, ground handlers and harbour masters; nationally, the Ministry's border statistics. The rule that prevents most errors is to put the publisher, the title and the date in the same sentence as the number, and never place two publishers in one column without a header saying who counted. When two figures disagree, the useful question is what each one measures, not which one is wrong.

How do I set the official table beside my own guest mix?#

Compare shares, not counts, over identical months: turn both your own registration data and the gate table into percentages of their own total, then look at the gap market by market.

Build your own mix from guest registration records, which carry nationality, and count room nights rather than arrivals if you want commercial weight. Convert both sides into shares of their own total. For example, a market at 12% of the gate and 4% of your room nights is either an opportunity or a structural mismatch, and the next step is to find out which.

Keep the period identical. A nine-month provincial table set against your twelve-month mix will mislead you before you have started. Ask three questions of every gap: do we actively sell to that market, does an agency contract steer it elsewhere, and does our gate mainly serve hotels in another province. Repeat the comparison each quarter. One reading is an anecdote, three readings are a pattern. Accept the ceiling: gate data tells you who arrives in the region, and only your own data tells you who books you. The national picture behind these tables is covered in our overview of Türkiye's 2025 source markets, and the monthly rhythm of the largest ones in when the top source markets travel.

From table to decisions: languages, sales trips and contract periods#

A nationality table earns its place only if it changes one of three things: the languages you can serve, where you spend sales effort, or when you sign.

Languages follow the top three or four groups at your gate, not the national top three. For example, a market at 8% still needs someone who speaks it at two in the morning. Sales trips should be chosen by a market's size at your gate and by whether you already hold a contract there, not by its position in a national ranking. Contract periods follow the shape of the market: a market with a sharp summer peak needs allotments agreed months earlier, and a market that spreads across the year changes your seasonality argument.

School-holiday calendars in the source market set the weeks a family market can travel, so they belong in the same planning file as the nationality table. Test before you commit: a market that grew in one year may be a single good year, so check two or three years of the same table before you add a language or a sales trip, and see our piece on testing Poland and India in the Ministry's data. Recheck the plan when the table moves, but do not rewrite it on one month's swing. For the staffing side, our guide to a language plan for your guest mix turns the same table into a hiring plan.

What to do next#

Open the Ministry's 2025 yearly border statistics bulletin, find Table 8, and write down the four largest nationalities at your province's gates with their shares. Then put your own 2025 room-night mix beside them, in shares, for the same months. The gap between the two columns is your agenda for languages, sales trips and contract timing, and it is more useful than any national ranking. If your province is Muğla or İstanbul, pull the directorate's monthly table from the same exercise: the Muğla monthly nationality tables (opens in a new tab) and the İstanbul monthly tourism statistics reports (opens in a new tab) both run to September 2026.