Will Nicole Kidman save Turkish tourism?

Hollywood movie star Nicole Kidman has become one of the new faces of Turkish tourism. Advertisements with her have been published in German daily Die Welt and will soon be published in Russian daily Pravda.

 Kidman has herself said she wants to visit Gallipoli due to the shared history of Turkey and Australia. 

The recent International Tourism Bourse (ITB) fair in Berlin was visited by Foreign Affairs Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu and Tourism Minister Nabi Avcı. However, Turkish tourism executives have expressed disappointment that it coincided with the peak in tension between Turkey and Europe. 

Participants at the fair expected Çavuşoğlu's visit to help restore the sector's relations with Germany.

 However, the visit of both Çavuşoğlu and Avcı only served to escalate tension because of the questions asked to them by the press.  

"Both publications in the German media and discourse rising in Turkey against Germany about 'fascism' and 'Nazism' have prompted the German tourism sector to start a '2017 No Turkey' campaign," one tourism executive told me that.

In other words, unfortunately, this year at ITB Berlin there was an anti-Turkey wind blowing. The tourism sector had been expecting relations to improve, but exactly the opposite happened. 

This is a particularly unpleasant situation because Germany was the number one country for sending tourists to Turkey between January and August 2016. The number of incoming German tourists in that period was 2.71 million. The number of tourists from Georgia, in second place, was just over half that number at 1.47 million. 

More than half of the tourists who visited Turkey in the January-August 2016 period came from European countries. 

At a time when...