TÜİK data portal, EVDS and the Ministry's Excel files: pulling tourism series into your own table

Three doors hold Türkiye's official tourism series: TÜİK's Veri Portalı and its MEDAS table tool, the Central Bank's EVDS, and the Culture and Tourism Ministry's Excel bulletins. Pull each series from its own door, then keep one sheet with a source column, a status column and the date you checked it.

The market page of the monthly report is due on Monday. The visitor number came from one site, the nights from a spreadsheet someone saved last year, and the occupancy rate from a bulletin whose sheet now has a different name. None of the three carries the date it was downloaded.

This article walks through each door, click by click, for the series a hotel actually uses: visitors, nights, the occupancy rate and card spending on accommodation. After reading it you will be able to pull each series from the right place, export it, and keep one sheet that anyone in the meeting can defend. For what each series counts and how to cite it, see our facts page.

Which three places publish Türkiye's tourism data, and what sits behind each?#

Three: TÜİK's Veri Portalı with its MEDAS table tool, the Central Bank's EVDS, and the Culture and Tourism Ministry's own statistics pages. Each holds a different slice, and each exports in a different way.

TÜİK publishes departing visitors, tourism revenue and trip characteristics. The Ministry publishes border arrivals, accommodation statistics and the certified facility stock. The Central Bank's EVDS publishes economic, monetary and financial series, produced by the Bank or supplied by other institutions (TCMB, EVDS Hakkında, checked 7 November 2026).

The Ministry's statistics page at yigm.ktb.gov.tr/TR-9851 is a directory, not a dataset. On 7 November 2026 it listed border statistics, accommodation statistics, facility statistics, tourism revenue and expenditure, domestic tourism, tourist profile, travel agency numbers by year, marine tourism and yacht statistics, quality certificates, a revision and error policy, a release calendar, and the e-Devlet request.

Four of those items leave the Ministry's site. Turist Profili opens TÜİK's MEDAS at kn=74. İç Turizm opens TÜİK's portal. Veri Yayımlama Takvimi opens TÜİK's release calendar. Turizm İstatistikleri Talebi opens e-Devlet. A fifth, Turizm İstatistikleri Sisteme Giriş, opens the Ministry's own login at is.kultur.gov.tr; that is a data-entry system for facilities, not a public download.

Choose the door by the question, not by habit. How many people arrived is a Ministry border bulletin. How much they spent is a TÜİK revenue table. How many nights were sold in certified facilities is a Ministry accommodation bulletin. Card spending series, where the Central Bank publishes them, sit in EVDS; confirm the series exists before you rely on it.

Write the door into the sheet the first time. A number without its door cannot be re-checked when someone asks in March where it came from.

How do you pull a table from the TÜİK data portal and MEDAS?#

You choose a subject, then indicators, time and level, and the tool builds a report you can export. The four choices are the record you keep, not just the file name.

TÜİK calls its main site the Veri Portalı, at veriportali.tuik.gov.tr. The older data.tuik.gov.tr address forwards there (TÜİK, checked 7 November 2026). The table tool is MEDAS, the Merkezi Dağıtım Sistemi (Central Dissemination System), at biruni.tuik.gov.tr/medas. There you pick a Konu (subject), for example Turizm İstatistikleri, then Göstergeler (indicators), Zaman (time) and Düzey (level), and build a Rapor (report). The Ministry's Turist Profili link lands directly on kn=74 in MEDAS, which saves the first click and shows how a subject is addressed inside the tool.

Record the four choices next to the number. The same indicator at a different level, national against province, is a different figure, and a reader who cannot see the level cannot check it.

The separate web service is not a hotel's route. TÜİK opens the information in MEDAS databases through it only to public bodies and bodies of public-body character, under a signed web service agreement (TÜİK, Ürün ve Hizmetlerimiz (opens in a new tab), checked 7 November 2026). A hotel's route is the browser and the export.

TÜİK revises series. A table pulled in March and the same table pulled in November can differ, so the date checked belongs in the row. Decide before you export whether the series is a count or a rate. A rate has no unit of persons, and mixing the two in one column breaks every comparison below it.

How do you find a series in EVDS and export it to Excel?#

Choose a subject, a sub-subject and a data group, add the series you want, then use Tablo Oluştur and export the table to Excel.

EVDS is the Elektronik Veri Dağıtım Sistemi (Electronic Data Delivery System) at the Central Bank. It is an open data platform that publishes economic, monetary and financial indicators as time series (TCMB, EVDS Hakkında (opens in a new tab), checked 7 November 2026). The current version, EVDS3, went live in 2025 at evds3.tcmb.gov.tr. The older evds.tcmb.gov.tr and evds2.tcmb.gov.tr addresses forward to it, so an old bookmark still works.

There are three ways in: the web interface with alphabetical and hierarchical categories, an advanced search and metadata views; REST web services that return JSON, CSV or XML; and export tools for bulk Excel download, chart output and automatic e-mail delivery. The Excel path is short: subject, sub-subject, data group, add the series, Tablo Oluştur, export.

Automatic updates inside Excel need two things first: EVDS membership and an API key. Without them the monthly refresh is manual, and the routine should say so.

The search box looks through metadata and report pages. Words typed in quotation marks return only pages where the words appear together, which is the fastest way to cut a common word out of the results. Check the frequency before you compare two series. A weekly series and a monthly series of the same thing are not the same table, and one cannot be pasted under the other. For the weekly card spending series in particular, see our guide to reading the central bank's weekly card spending figures.

Which Ministry Excel files does a hotel need, and why do the sheet names move?#

For a market page you need three: border statistics, accommodation statistics and facility statistics. The sheet names move because each bulletin is rebuilt for its release, so you match on the menu entry and the file, never on the tab name.

Border statistics carry the yearly and monthly arrivals bulletins. On 7 November 2026 the page listed the 2025 yearly bulletin and the September 2026 monthly bulletin. These files are marked Veriler geçicidir, so the status column says provisional.

Accommodation statistics carry arrivals, overnight stays and the occupancy rate in Ministry-certified (İşletme and Basit) facilities. Check the August 2026 bulletin for a provisional mark and record what you find; the metadata gives no revision calendar, so when no mark is present the status column says not stated, never final. Facility statistics carry the stock of certified facilities, rooms and beds. The certified facility stock is published as provisional (Ministry of Culture and Tourism, certified accommodation statistics, August 2026); record the status word the file itself carries rather than assuming one.

Never shorten the occupancy rate to hotel occupancy. It covers Ministry-certified facilities, not hotels, and the published file does not state how the figure is defined, so do not present it as a room measure until the Ministry confirms the basis.

Two items on the menu are not Ministry files at all. Turist Profili opens TÜİK's MEDAS and İç Turizm opens TÜİK's portal, so the source line changes even though the click started on the Ministry's page.

Keep the downloaded file, not only the number. When a tab is renamed next year, the saved bulletin can still be re-read; a pasted figure cannot. Name the file in the row the way the publisher names it, with the month and year, so a colleague can find the same download without asking.

What should one row of your own table contain?#

Nine fields: the series in the publisher's words, what it counts, its unit, its period, its status, its publisher and title, the file or table it came from, the date you checked it, and a link.

What it counts is the field that prevents most errors. Departing visitors, border arrivals, arrivals at certified facilities and overnight stays are four different things, and TÜİK's count of departing visitors and the Ministry's count of border arrivals are not reconciled by either publisher.

Unit: persons, nights, Turkish lira, US dollars, percent. A rate and a count never share a column, and a currency is never left implicit. Period and frequency: month, quarter or year. TÜİK publishes tourism revenue by quarter and does not publish a year-to-date total, so quarters are never added together to make a growth figure for the year.

Status: provisional, not stated, or revised. The Ministry marks border bulletins provisional. Record the status word the bulletin actually carries, and write not stated when none is present. Publisher, title and date, written so the sentence in the report can carry its source in the same line. A number with no publisher is a rumour with a decimal point.

Date checked and link let the next person repeat the pull in the same place. Use one term for one concept through the whole sheet: if the column says nights, it does not say days three rows later. For a longer treatment of source discipline in investment work, see which official tables a feasibility study should use.

What if the table you need is not published?#

The Ministry runs an e-Devlet service called Turizm İstatistikleri Talebi, and its metadata says micro data available on request are sent to the requester by e-mail as Excel reports. What the public pages do not say is who may apply, what can be requested, or whether there is a fee or a response time.

The service opens only after identity verification. The accepted methods are an e-Devlet password, a mobile signature, an electronic signature, a Turkish ID card or internet banking (Ministry metadata, checked 7 November 2026). The Ministry's accommodation metadata, last updated 23 December 2024, lists two forms of distribution: the statistics bulletin and a database subject to approval via e-Devlet. The border statistics metadata names the same channel.

Because eligibility, scope, fee and response time are not published, confirm them with the Ministry before you build a report around the answer. Do not promise a colleague a table you have not seen.

Write the request like a specification: the series, the unit, the period, the level (province, facility type) and the format you can use. Keep the reply with its date. A table sent by e-mail is a source like any other, and it needs the same row in the sheet as a public bulletin.

If the request is refused or delayed, the published bulletin is still the citable source. Say in the report what is not published rather than filling the gap with an estimate.

How do you keep the sheet current in fifteen minutes a month?#

Put the release calendar in the same file and refresh only the rows whose release has landed. The work is small if the format is fixed.

TÜİK's release calendar is at tuik.gov.tr/Kurumsal/Veri_Takvimi. The Ministry's Veri Yayımlama Takvimi item forwards to the same calendar, so one bookmark covers both.

The routine: open the calendar, list what was released since the last refresh, open only those doors, replace the row, update the date checked. Keep the old row instead of overwriting it. A revision is far easier to explain when the previous value is still visible next to the new one.

One owner, one file, one location. A market page assembled from three personal downloads is a page nobody can defend in a meeting.

Check the status word on each refreshed row. A bulletin that was provisional last month may still be provisional this month, and the sheet should say so rather than quietly dropping the word. If a door has moved, record the new address in the row rather than in a separate note. The next person reads the row, not the note.

What to do next#

Build the column headers today, before the next release, and fill one row from each of the three doors so the format is tested while the work is still small. The three doors are not a problem to solve once; they are a monthly routine, and the sheet is what turns three downloads into one defensible market page.