Average daily rate

Istanbul's embattled tourism may lose in 2017 and the city needs urgent measures to be taken, as hotel room prices keep decreasing, a leading sector association has said.

Hotels in Istanbul experienced the biggest decline in both revenue per available room (RevPAR) and average daily rate (ADR), a measure of the average rate paid for rooms sold, among all European destinations in January, as the city's hotel occupancy rates continued to decline, fresh data showed. 

Nearly half of the hotel rooms in Turkey are empty with an 11 percent fall in 2017, a recent report by STR Global, a data company, has stated. 

A 1.9 percent increase in the last month of 2016, which was solely revenue from New Year's Day bookings in the Mediterranean resort city of Antalya, did not help annual figures recover, which stood at 50.8 percent. 

According to data released by STR, a US-based company dealing in analysing trends and supply and demand in the global tourism industry, Greek hotels reached 81.9% capacity in the 3rd quarter of 2016. The figure confirms the positive performance of the Greek accommodation industry for the months of September and August. The data shows a 5.8% rise in comparison to last year’s respective term.

Turkey's hoteliers experienced their "emptiest" summer season, as the sector saw the steepest decline in hotel occupancy rates in August, which is normally one of the hottest months for the sector, said a leading association on Sept. 26, adding that Turkey was also the country that experienced the lowest hotel occupancy rates across Europe. 

Hotel occupancy rates declined below 50 percent in Turkey in February, a decrease of 13.4 percent compared to the same term of 2015. Last year's rate was measured at 57.6 percent, whereas this year occupancy dipped to 49.9 percent in the same period.