Number of British tourists in north ‘halved’ since 2003

The number of British tourists travelling to the north has halved since 2003, according to reports published on Wednesday.

Newspaper Yeni Duzen’s columnist Cenk Mutluyakali wrote on Thursday that he had been told by the north’s ‘tourism ministry’s’ undersecretary Serhan Aktunc that just 8,316 British tourists travelled to the north in the first five months of the year.

This is just over half of the figure reported in the first five months of 2003, when a total of 16,310 British tourists travelled to the north.

Mutluyakali also reported that the number of tourists travelling to the north from Sweden and Denmark had also decreased since last year.

He wrote 7,397 Swedish tourists and 4,689 Danish tourists travelled to the north in 2023. In the first five months of this year, that figure had fallen to just 442 Swedish tourists and 433 Danish tourists.

In addition, he also wrote that the number of Greek Cypriots staying overnight in hotels in the north has fallen in the first five months of the year compared to the same period in 2003.

He wrote that in total, 7,525 Greek Cypriots stayed overnight in the north in the first five months of 2003, compared to just 7,024 in the first five months of this year.

In addition, Mutluyakali wrote that the number of tourists travelling to the north from Turkey has increased considerably since even last year, with a total of 370,520 Turkish tourists travelling to the north in the first five months of 2024, compared to 259,770 in the first five months of last year.

“This is probably because they cannot go to the south of the island, and, of course, casino tourism,” he wrote.