TURKEY’S ISLAMIC-FRIENDLY RESORTS SPARK BOOM TURKEY’S $26 billion (£19bn) tourism industry is quietly growing as beach holidays for conservative Muslims become popular. Dozens of hotels and resorts on Turkey’s shores, featuring separate pools and beaches for men and women to meet religious strictures on modesty, are attracting families from Turkey, the Middle East and Muslim communities in the West. While still only accounting for a small fraction of tourists, the market for “halal”, or Islamic-compliant, holidays has shrugged off the turmoil and looks set for more growth. “In the last couple of years there was a boycott of Turkey as a tourism destination, but we have seen halal-friendly tourism booming throughout this period,” said Ufuk Secgin of halalbooking.com, which promotes international Islamic holidays. The total number of tourist arrivals in Turkey dropped by a quarter to a 10-year low in 2016, hit by a failed coup, a wave of bomb attacks and a dispute with Moscow which kept millions of Russians away. It bounced back last year and the government expects 40 million visitors this year. Secgin’s company brought 12,000 tourists in 2015, almost doubling that number in each of the next two years despite turbulence in Turkey. This year it expects 70,000 to come to visit the country whose president, Tayyip Erdogan, is a pious Muslim who has brought religion back into mainstream public life. Only 60 or so hotels and resorts offer halal-friendly breaks, out of many thousands of hotels across Turkey. However, a report in November said the country has jumped four places to the third most popular destination for Islamic holidays, behind the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia. In a sign of the popularity of the halal hotels, they were all fully booked in Turkey last year for the Eid al-Fitr holiday which marks the end…
You do not have access to this content. You need to create an account.
