Nearly 11.5M foreigners visit Turkey in 2018

Nearly 11.5 million foreigners visited Turkey in the first five months of 2018, the Culture and Tourism Ministry announced on Friday.

The ministry said that the figure rose by 30.8 percent on a yearly basis, up from 8.8 million in January-May last year.

Istanbul, Turkey's largest city by population and one of its top tourist draws, saw the highest number of visitors, with nearly 4.9 million in the five-month period.

The Mediterranean resort city Antalya came in second, with 2.64 million foreign visitors.

As for the nationalities of foreign visitors, Russia took first place with 12.1 percent -- some 1.4 million visitors -- over the same period, followed by Germany (9.7 percent) and Iran (8.55 percent).

Official data showed that air travel was the preferred means of transport, with 11.7 million travelers, while 4.5 million used roads and around 375,000 came by sea.

In May, 3.7 million foreigners also visited the country, up 16.27 percent from May 2017.

In 2016, some 35 million foreigners visited the country, in the midst of a tourism slowdown after the Fetullah Terrorist Organization's (FETÖ) defeated coup, but the sector improved in 2017.

Turkey expects 40 million tourists from abroad this year, according to private sector representatives and officials.

Culture and Tourism Minister Numan Kurtulmuş has set the country's 2023 targets as 50 million tourists and $50 billion in income.