A courageous investment in tourism

Bank loans in Turkey's tourism industry have increased 70 percent in the past two-and-a-half years, despite undergoing a deep crisis. According to official data, average room prices have gone down 35 percent while one million people have lost their jobs. Amid this atmosphere, I met a brave Don Quixote investing in this industry.

A young Aegean woman is courageously creating a new brand with an investment of 20 million euros. Ece Tonbul is the daughter of a family who has been involved in the tourism industry for 40 years in Kuşadası. Her father is the doyen of tourism and has witnessed how a small, 1960s fishermen's town of 5,000 people turned into the major touristic destination, Kuşadası. With the opening of the cruise port in the 1960s, today, Kuşadası has a population of one million in the summer. Unfortunately however, it is a resort town that has been a victim of poor urbanization.

I visited Hasan Tonbul at his organic farm at Özdere near Kuşadası. He started out as a tour guide before he borrowed 50 Turkish Liras from the bank and founded Diana Tourism in 1977. The company grew in years and was the first one to charter flights from Benelux countries to Turkey. Under their umbrella, the Paloma Group now owns 11 hotels.

"I have been working in hotels over the summers since I was 11 or 12. I know everything about hotels, from laundry to kitchen to marketing," said Ece Tonbul, the CEO of Diana Hotel Investments. After studying economy abroad, and receiving a graduate degree in gastronomy, the young mother of two has created a new identity for the Paloma Club Sultan near Kuşadası, built on an area of 180 thousand square meters.

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