Skift Take
Tourists came, they spent, they left. Now, Istanbul's goal is that they come back and tell their friends.
Liam McDonald, Andrew Newell, and their group of six friends and family spent roughly $1,200 each for flights and hotels in Istanbul this weekend.
They had been waiting to see which teams would be playing at the UEFA Champions League final when their favorite football team, Manchester City, beat Real Madrid in the semi-final three weeks ago. That’s when they booked the trip from Dublin.
They travel about once a month from Dublin to Manchester for games during the season. When they learned their team would be in the final, there was no question that they would take their first trip to Istanbul.
“This is a once in a lifetime experience,” McDonald said.
Their group wasn’t the only one that jumped to book their flights and hotels. Hotel occupancy — not including short-term rentals through platforms like Airbnb — in Istanbul increased roughly 20 percent during the period directly after the semi-final games. There were a third more flights this week from Manchester alone, totaling more than 9,300 passengers, according to data from aviation analytics firm Cirium.
Manchester City and Inter Milan each got 20,000 tickets