The number of tourists visiting the unrecognized TRNC has increased sharply.
Thus, the volume of foreign citizens who arrived in the occupied territories from January to May 2024 reached 2.7 million people. The number of tourists staying in local hotels increased by 47% compared to the same period in 2023.
At the same time, over 5 months, a total of 475,322 people lived in tourist accommodation facilities, with the largest number of visitors coming from the UK (almost 126,000 people).
Interestingly, the largest number of people who decided to relax in the northern part of Cyprus went there through border crossings. In other words, many arrived at the airports of Larnaca and Paphos, and from there they went to the occupied territories. By the way, this explains the sharp increase in passenger traffic at the airports of the Republic of Cyprus and at the same time the low occupancy rate of hotels in the southern part of the island.
“This phenomenon has been intensifying in recent years. Unfortunately, we see the pseudo-state, and perhaps indirectly Turkey, investing too much in our occupied homeland, which mainly affects the occupancy of hotel complexes and other tourist sites in free Cyprus,” PASYXE CEO Philokipros Rousounidis said.According to him, it is also alarming that among the tourists choosing the occupied territories, there are tourists from the British market, which accounts for 35% of our tourist flow with more than a million arrivals.
“We do not stop informing and calling on our main tourism partners from abroad to limit this phenomenon as much as possible, but we see that these campaigns and the millions of investments made by the pseudo-state are taking up space,” adds Rousounidis.It should be noted that hotel occupancy in the Republic of Cyprus reached 90% in August, which is in line with last year, taking into account geopolitical events, as the tense situation in the region leads to last-minute cancellations.
“At the moment, booking cancellations are not widespread, but, of course, the current situation worries us,” concluded Rousunidis.Source: omegalive.com.cy
