One of the most fascinating hidden stories in travel tech hubs is Turkey, which has built a much larger sector than the global industry realizes, one that barely registers in global discussions, even on Skift. Turkey has skyrocketed to 60-plus million visitors a year post-Covid, about $60 billion in annual tourism revenue last year, and a lot of what runs it are companies even many travel insiders would never have heard of.
Why this has happened is pretty obvious: the industry’s working map of where travel tech sits comes from tracking three things: where the venture capital pools, where the engineers cluster, and where the conference circuit is. And Turkey is a very non-obvious hub on any of those. Well, that’s what I assumed, until I started digging — the same way I have with the others in this series over the past few months, on the India travel tech scene, Montreal, and the UK.
Unlike other hubs, Turkey’s emerged because of the difficulty of the operating
source
