Why visitors come to Türkiye: reading TÜİK’s purpose-of-visit figures

Purpose of visit is the reason a departing visitor gives at the border in TÜİK's Departing Visitors Survey. In 2025, TÜİK (Tourism Statistics, annual 2025, 30 January 2026) recorded 63,917,057 departing visitors: 67.7% travel, entertainment, sport or culture, 19.6% visiting relatives and friends, and 2.5% business.

A revenue manager reads a headline saying two thirds of visitors come for leisure, then looks at a corporate account that fills the same weeks every October. Both are true, and the reason sits in how the question is asked and who answers it. This article explains how TÜİK's purpose-of-visit question works, what the eight categories cover and hide, why foreign visitors and citizens resident abroad answer differently, and how to read the quarterly tables without fooling yourself. It ends with where your own segment data fits.

What is TÜİK's purpose-of-visit question, and who answers it?#

It is one question in a face-to-face survey put to people as they leave Türkiye, and the answers are published quarterly as shares of all departing visitors. The frame is passport records held by the Emniyet Genel Müdürlüğü, the general directorate of security; the sample is interviewed face to face at border gates. The Departing Visitors Survey is supplemented by Interbank Card Center card data and by a separate Health Tourism Survey, so the published totals are not built from interviews alone.

Publication is quarterly, roughly 30 days after each quarter closes, and the annual bulletin follows in late January, according to TÜİK's Turizm İstatistikleri metadata (No. 58144) (opens in a new tab). There is no seasonal adjustment: a July to September quarter and an October to December quarter are raw and not directly comparable.

Each departing visitor gives one answer about the trip that just ended. It is not the reason a room was booked, not a spend category, and not a hotel segment. The question measures the country, not your property.

Which purpose categories does TÜİK use?#

Eight categories, from travel and leisure down to religion and pilgrimage, and every departing visitor is placed in exactly one of them. The categories are exclusive, so the shares add up to about 100% and no visitor is counted twice.

Travel, entertainment, sport or cultural activities is the catch-all leisure bucket: a beach holiday, a guided cultural tour and a sports camp all land there. Visiting relatives and friends is not a hotel stay by definition; many of these visitors sleep in private homes and still count as visitors. Business covers conferences, meetings and assignments, without separating a one-night meeting from a month-long posting. Health or medical reasons and education or training are both qualified as less than a year, which separates them from people who move to Türkiye.

The list belongs to TÜİK, not to the hotel industry: no category maps one to one onto a market segment code in a property management system.

What share of visitors came for each purpose in 2025?#

Travel, entertainment, sport or culture took 67.7% of 63,917,057 departing visitors, visiting relatives and friends 19.6%, and every other purpose stayed under 6%. The source for every figure in this section is TÜİK's Turizm İstatistikleri, Q4 and annual 2025 bulletin (No. 54158, 30 January 2026) (opens in a new tab).

The order after the top two: shopping 5.9% (3,802,328 visitors), business 2.5% (1,579,817), health or medical reasons 2.2% (1,398,580), other 1.9% (1,210,904), education or training 0.2% (134,437), and religion or pilgrimage 0.03% (19,195). Quote the printed shares as printed. They round to about 100% but not exactly, and a writer who adjusts them creates a number TÜİK never published.

These are 2025 figures. Nothing here supports a 2026 trend claim, and 2026 visitor numbers are described as flat.

Public data. No endorsement implied.

Why do foreign visitors and citizens resident abroad answer differently?#

Because the total includes Turkish citizens who live abroad, and most of them come to see family, which lifts the visiting-relatives share and lowers the leisure share. TÜİK counts departing visitors, not foreign nationals, so citizens resident abroad sit inside the 63,917,057. Among them, 63.4% gave visiting relatives and friends as their purpose in 2025.

The consequence is a blend. The 19.6% all-visitor figure for visiting relatives is pulled up by that group, so the leisure share among foreign visitors alone is higher than 67.7%. That is reasoning from the two printed figures, not a TÜİK number, and computing one would create a figure TÜİK never published.

A hotel selling to the diaspora market in July and a hotel selling to foreign leisure travelers in July are therefore reading the same headline in opposite directions. Before comparing a supplier's chart with your own numbers, check which population it uses: all departing visitors, foreign visitors only, or border arrivals from a different publisher.

How do you read the quarterly tables without fooling yourself?#

Compare the same quarter with the same quarter a year earlier, and never add four quarters into a year-to-date growth rate, because TÜİK publishes quarters, not a running total. Check the bulletin number and date before you check the number itself. Compare Q3 with Q3: a summer quarter and a winter quarter differ in who travels, not only in how many.

Treat a seasonal pattern as seasonal. Without seasonal adjustment, a leisure share rising into summer is the calendar, not a trend. Do not sum quarters to produce a January to September change; TÜİK does not publish that total, and the sum is your arithmetic, not its statistic. Do not put pre-revision years next to current ones. Do not convert a change in share into a change in visitor numbers without the counts, because a share can rise while the count falls.

Business, health and shopping: what do the small shares mean for a hotel?#

They are small in national visitor counts but concentrated in particular cities, seasons and properties, so a 2.5% national share can be a large share of one hotel's October. Business at 2.5% covers conferences, meetings and assignments; city and conference hotels feel it, while the national share says nothing about a single property's mix.

Health at 2.2% counts departing visitors whose stated purpose was health or medical reasons for less than a year. It is not a count of international patients treated, so press figures for patient numbers should be checked against their own source. For what is counted and by whom, see health tourism in Türkiye's statistics.

Shopping at 5.9% is often a secondary purpose. The survey forces one answer, so a shopping trip that also fills two hotel nights is counted once, as shopping. Purpose is not a segment: a visitor who answers business may be staying in a resort, and a visitor who answers leisure may be in a city hotel next to the airport.

Read national shares as the backdrop for a budget, never as a forecast for one property. When you need to know which source markets travel in which months, that is a different table from the purpose table, and it should be read separately; see when Türkiye's top source markets travel.

Where does your own segment data fit?#

Your property system records why a guest is in your house, and that is the only purpose data you can act on at property level. Set segment codes once and keep them stable across seasons, so a year-on-year comparison means something. Record the purpose at booking, not at checkout, and allow one primary code per reservation.

Use the national shares as a sanity check on your mix, never as a target to move toward. Compare your own mix with your own mix a year earlier in the same quarter, the same discipline TÜİK's quarterly tables demand. For how to set the codes up, see hotel market segmentation.

Remember the unit differs: a national share is a share of visitors, while your report is room nights and revenue, and the two can move in opposite directions. If you want to connect the national picture to money rather than people, read how much visitors spend in Türkiye.

What to do next#

Open TÜİK's annual 2025 bulletin, copy the eight purpose categories onto one page, and write your own segment codes beside them. Mark which of your segments the national table cannot see, then repeat the exercise with the same quarter next year. The purpose figures explain the country; only your own codes explain your hotel.