Analyzing Pandemic Effects on Turkey’s Tourism with R

Introduction

Published in

EDA Journal

4 min readDec 20, 2022

Hello, we are RambleOn from MEF University. Our group was created for one of our lessons, Data Analystics Essentials. We chose the tables with long-year data and worked in a way that would enable us to reach a meaningful result. We would like to share the results of our studies with you in a short and non-technical language, this is our aim in this post.

Key Takeaways

1- When we look at the number of visitors in general, the remarkable decrease in the pandemic period is striking. And in many respects, the number of tourists before the pandemic was still not reached.

2- When we look at the income from the pandemic, the improvement after the pandemic has been visible. And however, the amount of expenditure has not increased that much in touristic activities after the pandemic.

3- In country-wide analyzes, we see that while the number of visitors in some countries could not reach the pre-pandemic levels, in some countries there were large numbers of arrivals that did not exist before.

4- In summary, stagnation during and after the pandemic is gradually dissipating and the number of tourists coming to Turkey and their expenditures are increasing.

About the Project

We chose the topic “Education, Culture, Sport and Tourism” because we think that the pandemic in the world and its effects (health, economics, etc.) have a high impact on tourism activities. When we started the project, we wanted to see and visualize this effects with our data sets.

About the Datasets

Our datasets were taken from the Turkish Statistical Institute, we used the three tables below.

“ Number of Departing Visitors by Country of Residence”
“Foreign and Citizen Visitors by Purpose of Visit (Foreigner and Citizens Resident Abroad)”
“Tourism Income, Expenditure and Average Number of Nights”

Foreign and Citizen Visitors by Purpose of Visit

We expected to see dramatic decreases in quantities for all categories during the pandemic, but the rate of change for some categories is lower. You can review our charts for change details. We also did not expect that the values will rise so quickly with the decrease of the pandemic effects, you can see from our tables that visits other than compulsory reasons are increasing rapidly too.

The categories for this table:

Travel, entertainment, sportive or cultural activities
Visiting relatives and friends
Education, training (less than a year)
Health or medical reasons (less than a year)
Religion / Pilgrimage
Shopping
Transit
Business (conferences, meetings, assignments etc.)

Tourism Income, Expenditure and Average Number of Nights

Considering their purpose and the change they have, tourism activities should decrease and increase rapidly after the pandemic. However, if you examine our charts, you can see that only the first part is correct; the expected rise did not occur.

Number of Departing Visitors by Country of Residence

When we look at the nationalities, we can say;

Many countries still have not reached the number of tourists that existed before the pandemic.
Ukraine and Switzerland exceeded the number of tourists before the pandemic.
In Italy, Georgia, Greece, Japan we can see that there is a tourist arrival far below the pre-pandemic countries. these countries are far below their pre-pandemic arrivals.

Results of Analysis

The purpose of this analysis is to examine and visualize the effects of the pandemic on tourism in Turkey, and to present it with tables and graphs. It is possible to see the characters of these changes by examining the tables in the links. There were points where the results we thought before we started and the results of our investigation did not match, we hope our blog was interesting for you as well.