Türkiye residents travelling abroad: reading TÜİK’s outbound figures from a domestic hotel’s desk

TÜİK's quarterly tourism release reports both sides of travel: what visitors spend in Türkiye and what residents of Türkiye spend abroad. The second side sits under tourism expenditure, and Türkiye residents travelling abroad statistics belong to it. In 2025, 11,897,355 citizens resident in Türkiye visited another country and spent USD 9.6 billion in total (TÜİK, Tourism Statistics, Q4 and Annual 2025, No. 54158, 30 January 2026).

A revenue manager sees a bayram week soften and reaches for a national statistic to explain it. The statistic exists, it is published every quarter, and it cannot answer that question. What it can do is tell you how many residents of Türkiye travelled abroad, what they spent, and how that figure was collected, which is exactly the context you need before you blame your own pricing. This article walks through where the outbound figures sit, what they count, how they differ from domestic measures, and how to use them in a revenue meeting without misleading anyone.

Where do the outbound figures sit in TÜİK's tourism release?#

In the same quarterly bulletin as inbound visitors and revenue, in the tourism expenditure table. The release reports what visitors spend in Türkiye and what residents of Türkiye spend abroad, side by side and never netted against each other.

TÜİK publishes tourism statistics quarterly, and the fourth-quarter release carries the annual figure (TÜİK, Tourism Statistics, Q4 and Annual 2025, No. 54158, 30 January 2026). Two names carry two directions: tourism revenue is spending by visitors in Türkiye, while tourism expenditure is spending by residents of Türkiye abroad. A hotel reading only the revenue table is reading half the release. If you want the fuller picture of the inbound side, see what TÜİK's tourism revenue figure includes.

The outbound table is titled Turizm Gideri ve Kişi Başı Ortalama Harcama and runs from 2012. The number of citizens, the total spending and the average per person sit in the same table, so read the column header before the number: some columns are persons, some are thousands of dollars, some are averages. A misplaced column turns a level into a fake growth rate. The series is also not seasonally adjusted, so compare a quarter with the same quarter a year earlier, not with the quarter before it.

One caution on 2026: this article uses only the 2025 annual figures, because those are the ones checked against the bulletin text and table. For 2026 quarters, quote the bulletin that carries them and its date. Do not build your own year-to-date figure by adding quarters together; TÜİK publishes quarters, not a running total.

What exactly does TÜİK count when it says a citizen traveled abroad?#

It counts residents of Türkiye recorded at the border on their return from a trip abroad, and asks them what they spent. The frame is passport records; the numbers come mainly from a survey at the gate, supplemented by card-center data, not from hotel records.

The frame is passport records held by the migration authority; the survey is a face-to-face Departing Visitors Survey at border gates, supplemented by Interbank Card Center card data and a Health Tourism Survey (TÜİK, bulletin No. 58144, metadata sections 9, 14, 15 and 18). Because it happens at the border, the trip is captured at the moment of return, and spending is what the traveler reports rather than what a statement shows. That is the honest limit of the figure: it is a well-run survey, not an accounting record.

For 2025, TÜİK's tourism statistics release (opens in a new tab) reports that 11,897,355 citizens resident in Türkiye visited other countries, up 4.4%, and spent USD 807 each on average; total tourism expenditure rose 24% to USD 9,602,089 thousand, about USD 9.6 billion (No. 54158, 30 January 2026). The split is worth reading: USD 7,369,230 thousand was individual spending and USD 2,232,858 thousand was package-tour spending. A package buyer and an independent traveler are different customers with different habits, and the table lets you see both.

What it does not count matters just as much. Turkish citizens living abroad who come to Türkiye appear on the inbound side of the same release, not here. Domestic trips inside Türkiye come from a different survey altogether. Treat the figure as the survey's own count of citizens who visited abroad, and do not restate it as a count of households, of unique individuals across the year, or of holidaymakers only.

Outbound trips and domestic trips: why do the numbers come from different surveys?#

Because they are collected by different instruments. Outbound travel is counted at the border on return; domestic travel is counted by asking households at home about trips they have already taken.

A separate household survey of residents covers trips inside Türkiye, and it includes trips that never touch a hotel: visiting relatives, a family summer house, one night with friends. The border survey asks a returning traveler at the gate. It cannot see a domestic trip at all, and the household survey cannot see a trip abroad. For the domestic side in detail, see what TÜİK's household survey counts as domestic tourism.

The consequence is that the two totals answer different questions and cannot be added into a single "total travel by residents of Türkiye" without stating a method and defending it. For a hotel, the split is actually useful: the household survey tells you how much domestic travel exists, and the border survey tells you how much travel spending leaves the country. Neither tells you what happened in your own competitive set.

A third measure sits beside them. The Ministry's accommodation bulletin counts nights in certified facilities only, so stays in unlicensed beds and in private homes are outside it. One habit prevents most errors: before quoting a travel number, say which survey it came from and what that survey can see.

How do outbound figures sit next to domestic nights in certified facilities?#

Side by side, in different units, without a causal reading. One counts trips by residents abroad; the other counts nights sold in Ministry-certified facilities inside Türkiye.

The Ministry's 2025 figures, from its annual accommodation bulletin (opens in a new tab), record 98,981,217 arrivals and 252,323,483 overnight stays in İşletme- and Basit-certified facilities. Of those nights, 154,799,879 were foreign guests and 97,523,604 were domestic guests; domestic arrivals, 50,163,366, outnumbered foreign arrivals, 48,817,851. The same bulletin gives 216,017,715 overnight stays for 2024, so the direction inside that register is up. That is a fact about the register, not a reason.

The units do not match: 11,897,355 outbound citizens against 50,163,366 domestic arrivals in certified facilities. Do not divide one by the other; a trip abroad and a facility arrival are not the same event. Nothing in either release links a person who traveled abroad to a bed that stayed empty. The datasets are collected separately and are not joined at the person level.

What you can say honestly is this: in 2025 both outbound travel and total overnight stays in certified facilities were larger than in 2024, the latter at 216,017,715 nights, and the two are read together as context for a market, not as an explanation of each other. If you use occupancy, use the Ministry's own label: the occupancy rate in Ministry-certified İşletme and Basit facilities, 49.54% in 2025 (Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2025 annual accommodation bulletin). It is not a hotel occupancy or a room occupancy figure.

What should a hotel selling to domestic guests do with these numbers?#

Use them to ask better questions about dates and price, then answer those questions from your own booking data. A national quarterly total sets the context; your pickup sets the decision.

Calendar first. Outbound trips cluster around school breaks, public holidays and bridge days, the same dates your domestic demand depends on. Take the direction from the release, then check your own pickup for those weeks. The outbound table will not tell you which day softens; your own booking curve will, and the decision is made months before the week, which is the argument for planning bayram and public holiday rates early.

Price comes next. Compare your own rate for a holiday week with what a package abroad costs for the same week, priced the way your guest would price it: per person, with flights, for a comparable room type. That is a sales conversation, not a conclusion from a statistical release. Then the segment question: which of your domestic segments has the passport, the income and the habit of buying a package? A family that drives four hours to you and a family that flies abroad are not the same buyer, even at the same income.

For the shoulder season, if a specific week loses flexible guests, the usual answer is a different week and a different offer, not a lower rate across the whole month. The same logic applies to pricing and selling shoulder and low season generally: match the offer to the week that actually softened, not to the month around it.

Finally, set a quarterly habit. Put the TÜİK outbound table next to your own domestic segment's pickup for the same quarter and write two sentences about what you see. Three quarters of that beats any single release.

How do you cite these figures without misleading anyone?#

Name the publisher, the release and its date, keep the unit TÜİK printed, and say which survey the number came from.

Use the source line as printed: Source: TÜİK, Tourism Statistics, IV. Quarter: October-December and Annual, 2025 (No. 54158, 30 January 2026). Keep the printed unit and say "about" when you round: USD 9,602,089 thousand is about USD 9.6 billion. Never turn a level into a growth claim the bulletin does not make.

Write "citizens resident in Türkiye who visited abroad", not "Turks" and not "tourists". The definition is the point of the number. Keep the revised series together as well: the 2024 revision recalculated the series back to 2012, so a chart that starts earlier mixes two methods and invites a correction. Add the house line wherever public data appears: Public data. No endorsement implied. Label any illustrative figure as an example, and keep your own hotel's numbers out of a sentence that looks like a national statistic.

What to do next#

Pull the latest quarterly release, find the tourism expenditure table, and put it beside your own domestic pickup for the same quarter. Write two sentences: what the national figure did, and what your hotel did. The pieces fit in that order: the release tells you which side of the ledger to look at, the survey tells you what the number can see, the Ministry register gives you the domestic nights to compare it with, and your own booking curve gives you the decision. Do that once a quarter and the outbound table stops being a headline and becomes a working tool.