Turkey’s largest promotional portal under construction

ANKARA - Anatolia News Agency

Turkey’s universities, hotels, shopping malls, restaurants, tourist and travel agencies, national palaces, museums and ancient sites will all come together under one roof in a new web platform to feature the best of Turkish tourism. The Turkish Tourism and Publicity Platform (TUTAP) has been working on a website to provide information about all such places along with photographs and introductory films.

TUTAP Chairman Fikret Yıldız said the platform had declared 2013 as a promotional year in Turkey and that they would begin a promotional mobilization. “The goal is to lighten the burden on the shoulders of the state to promote the country,” he said.

Shortest way to promote

Yıldız said that with the slogan “The shortest way to promote Turkey,” they had prepared the website www.turkiyetanitma.com. Once finished, it will be the largest promotional portal in Turkey.

He said that the website would provide information on every kind of event both domestically and abroad relating to Turkey, including fields such as faith, health and golf tourism. He said that in order to create an accurate and trustworthy portal, they obtained information from governors’ offices, district headquarters, culture and tourism directorates, municipalities and some civil society organizations. “We must get to the true sources. We are preparing the portal with completely true information provided by official institutions and not hearsay,” he said.

Works done in a year

Yıldız said work was continuing on the portal but they estimate that it will be completed for all provinces within a year.

“What we do is to make it easier to reach information. You can already find information about anything on the Internet but it is disorganized. If you want to know about a place, it will be enough to enter the TUTAP website. You will get information about this place and at the same you will be able to see the characteristics, cultural structure and tourism of this place on the website. We will present Turkey’s largest promotional portal to Internet users,” Yıldız said.

Yıldız said that the biggest source of income in tourism was faith tourism, but Turkey’s promotion abroad was insufficient in this area, adding that some four million tourists visit Turkey for faith tourism annually.

Faith tourists

“The most important share is money spent by these tourists. So far we have completed faith tourism work in six regions but there are 324 regions that have problems like transportation and accommodation. If these problems are overcome, we can host 50 million faith tourists a year. We are confident that we will get the biggest income from this field,” he said.

Yıldız said that they were focusing on the tourism potential of the capital, Ankara, which should be increased, adding that they have formed a new system for Ankara’s promotion where people can access a variety of information through the websites ankaraturizmi.com and ankaramiz.net.
“We will do the same for Istanbul and Diyarbakır,” he said.