Few cities exist in the world that boast of a richer history that Istanbul, the ancient yet modern city of Turkey.
The country's largest tourism destination now exemplifies Turkey's recovery from the July 15 coup attempt that saw visitor numbers significantly drop. In June, tourism arrivals fell by 41 percent to 2.4 million.
In this one month alone, the worst in recent history, the arrival numbers were still higher than Kenya's total arrivals of 1.18 million for the whole of 2015, and there are many lessons Kenya can learn to boost visitor arrival numbers.
And with the country mending relations with Russia, Istanbul and other tourism destination cities like Antalya are preparing for a boom once again.
Central to the growth of Turkish tourism is the national carrier, Turkish Airlines, which recently organised a trip to Istanbul for over 100 journalists from various countries. The airline boasts the largest number of destinations than any other competitor, touching down in 218 destinations in 108 countries.
Chairman Ilker Ayci announced that the airline will begin flights to Seychelles by the end of this month, to Dar es Salaam from December 12 and to Guinea early next year.
"We will continue to grow in Africa to connect Africa to the world," he said.
The efforts of the airline are supplemented by the building of a new airport in Istanbul that will have parking spaces for 550 aircraft with six runways. Phase one of the project due in 2018 will handle 90 million passengers.
Ataturk Airport is currently that third last in the world in passenger numbers after Heathrow in Britain and Charle de Gaulle in France. With the new airport, Istanbul aims to overtake Charle de Gaulle to become the second largest.
Ayci says the coup attempt marginally affected the airline's operations, although the management had to sack several employees suspected to have links to the organisers.
"Several hundred employees were sent away including managers, specialists and others. We failed to fly to the US for two days and because of the negative publicity we lost some passengers and tourist revenues dropped, but we are preparing to take off again in 2017," Ayci said.
Majority of Turkey's tourists are from Russia and Germany. Tourist numbers from Russia had fallen after a diplomatic row after Turkey shot down a Russian war plane near its border with conflict-torn Syria in November last year. Now both countries' Foreign Affairs ministries have not only resolved the issue, they have gone further to negotiate for Russians to travel to Turkey using their identity cards only (without the need for passports) and for them to be able to shop with their currency, the ruble, and not the US dollar.
