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 regime there decided to devalue the currency through several policies.
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One goal of such policies is to turn the country’s economy toward exports, such as the model used by many “developing countries” to manufacture cheaply (for shit wages) and export a lot. As you can imagine, that’s not compatible with a consumer economy (i.e. a nice service sector). When you devalue your currency (or just have inflation unintentionally), you make imports more expensive. For many countries, one of the biggest drivers is energy imports. Hungary is finding that out now too. If you need a harsher example, read about Lebanon in recent years (as if the threat of Israel invading isn’t enough).
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.