Turkish team comes to Israel in bid to woo back tourists

Some 50 hoteliers from 35 Turkish hotels, representatives of the Turkish tourism ministry and Israeli tourism wholesalers specializing in travel to Turkey met Tuesday at the David Intercontinental Hotel in Tel Aviv to find ways to draw Israelis back to Turkey.

In the wake of criticism and verbal confrontations between Turkey and Israel surrounding Operation Cast Lead, both official and non-official, Israeli tourism to Turkey plummeted by about 60% in the first months of this year, and hotels catering to Israelis visiting Turkey have been especially hard hit.

A representative of the Topkapi Palace and Kremlin Palace hotels says that the hotels have been making big investments in attracting Israeli tourism for the past ten years, and by 2008 were hosting 30,000 Israelis annually. "In the first months of this year, including Passover, our hotels saw a 40% drop compared to 2008. We have come to make a move toward conciliation with Israelis," he said.

Ahmet Barut, chairman of the Turkish Hotels Association, said that he understands the feelings of the Israeli public, but "we want to persuade them that they are welcome in Turkey." Israelis, he says, are emotional people, like the Turks, and so their responses are emotional.

"A little push is needed to get communication back into a positive mode," added the representative of a well-known chain. "What was going on was political, and politics isn't real life."

Turkish representatives also met with a few workers' committee representatives - customarily a fertile market for Turkish tourism and a moving force behind organized tours and trips for workplace employees - in an effort to persuade them to change their firm position against vacations to Turkey this year.

Turkey's ambassador to Israel Namik Tan reminded participants of the many-layered complexity of relations between Turkey and Israel, including economic relations, and noted that tourism represents the human connection between the two countries. Referring to the clash of words between Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and President Shimon Peres at the Davos forum in late January, Tan said it is not his place to correct the prime minister. "Something happened," he said, "but we need to get things back on track."