I sat and watched Sonneklar's network a bit last night on German TV options....it's the vacation package network. It runs twenty-four hours a day, and feature a seven-minute advertising piece on different options or deals.
If you wanted a four-star hotel in Turkey now.....on the south coast, for example....Club Falcon....with airfare, hotel room, two entire weeks in the sun.....with all meals covered and all drinks as part of your deal....then the going rate for August is 471 Euro total for each adult. I should note, that the package will even include the train ticket from whatever town or village you live in Germany....to Frankfurt, and the pick-up and transfer when you arrive in Turkey.
The enticement to go to Turkey....at least before the fake coup business....went along two lines. First, it was generally cheap (maybe not down to 471 Euro, but it certainly did entice you). Second, you could count on twelve of the fourteen days being 100-percent sunshine. For a German, this was perfect deal.
Toss in a decent four-star hotel.....an inviting pool....all your food in one big buffet area and as much as you want to eat.....and then all that beer, wine, coffee, or water free? It just made these vacation packages hard to turn down.
A German could pack up the family and know that their perfect vacation requirements were all covered. You didn't even have to leave the hotel compounds....staying the whole time at the resort and knowing that your kids were safe and could be swimming twelve hours a day, and that an AC unit back at the room would keep it half-way chilled for the evening hours.
For a decade, these resorts in Turkey kept getting built, and expanded upon. Most of the family-theme resorts have huge water-parks now associated with them and hired up eighteen-year old Germans as the kid-fun-managers....keeping them occupied and busy.
Dad would sit by the pool and sip through ten beers from noon until 6PM. Mom would guzzle down five or six cups of coffee and two or three glasses of wine. Sunburns would be attended to. If they left the resort, it was usually for some bus tour of some historic or ancient ruins.....or a trip through some carpet or leather jacket shop. They spent money on the Turkish economy and funneled Euro into literally hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout southern Turkey, along the coast.
Now? The tourist wave has stopped, and reality is setting in. There is some hope that the Russians might be enticed to return. For 2016, I have my doubts that the Russians will come. The best that they can hope is that things change and more Russians take up the place of the lost Europeans. It's a tough sell.
The future right now? It's a question mark.
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