Restaurants in some Turkish holiday towns are sitting half-empty in peak tourist season, as many locals find it’s cheaper to holiday in neighboring Greece than stay and eat in one of their own country’s world-famous resorts.
Angry citizens have taken to social media to share their bills, including the equivalent of $640 for food and drinks for five people in Bodrum and $30 for five scoops of ice cream in Cesme. Meanwhile from Mediterranean Greek islands just a few kilometers away, their fellow Turks boast they’re paying far less than prices at home.
“There’s a huge difference between the service and product quality, as well as prices here and there,” said Murat Yavuz, a retired Turkish banker who regularly visits Greece. “Restaurants here have used inflation as a pretext to push up prices.”
Restaurant and hotel prices rose by an average 91% in June from a year earlier, topping already eye-watering headline inflation of 71.6%. The sector constitutes a third of the services economy that the central bank has highlighted as a particular cause of concern in its fight against spiraling prices.
The above is/was correct, but for the last 1-2 years they actually flipped it around, artificially valuing the currency against USD, EUR while not keeping inflation under check. The inflation in TRY has been >100% for the last few years, while the TRY/USD parity barely moved. So it means that the prices are approximately at NYC levels for e.g. restaurants, and is shockingly expensive for most tourists, let alone the local people.