[LINK] "Istanbul Bomb Targets Tourism Already Reeling on Putin Snub"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg's Isobel Finkel, Selcan Hacaoglu and Tugce Ozsoy describe how the recent suicide bombing in Istanbul will hurt Turkey's tourist industry.

A suicide bomb in the heart of Europe’s largest city didn’t just target innocent tourists, it also hit a $32 billion industry already caught up in the conflict next door.

No one made a greater contribution to Turkey’s tourism receipts last year than Russians and Germans, who have helped make the country the world’s sixth most-popular holiday destination. Russians are staying away from Mediterranean resorts because of a political row over the war in Syria. Now Germans have been affected in the most-visited square in Istanbul, accounting for all of the 10 people left dead on Tuesday morning.

“The tourism sector will suffer even greater losses in 2016, particularly given that Germans constitute Turkey’s largest group of tourists,” said Naz Masraff, director for Europe at political risk consultants Eurasia Group. “The deteriorating security environment and its impact on tourism will weigh on economic sentiment.”

Turkey plans to increase the importance of tourism to help underpin a pickup in the economy following the collapse in emerging markets and a political quagmire that led to two elections in six months. Last year, though, was on course to be the first since 2006 when the number of tourists failed to rise.