I agree with a fair amount of that. It does seem that year after year those who don't up their game are the ones complaining and asking where all the tourists are. Staple parts of the tourism offer (alcohol, meat, fuel etc) rise at alarming rates due to taxation and other economic factors (that could be reversed, even if only partly) quite obviously will affect tourism negatively but are deemed acceptable. Tourism contributes around 11% to the overall economy - a larger contributor to their GDP than agriculture.
Accepted the exchange rate helps but that is a negative economic trend.
I despair of the Blue Mosque/Dalyan Delta/belly dancer adverts which haven't changed in over a decade. Turkey needs to attract those who have inaccurate visions of Turkey - desert, curly shoes, food poisoning - and all the rest. Showing them an old wooden boat moored up won't change their view, no matter how blue the bay looks.
Furthermore, groups like the Hisaronu one on Facebook tells of poorer service, poorer quality food and shorter tempered restaurant owners who appear to be giving less and when confronted by disappointed diners can only show them the door and throw in a few choice phrases ending with off. The old, tired best form of defence being attack, seen several times by most of us.
People don't need to come to Turkey and it's high time they realised it, and ditched the "if they don't like it they can p*** off" attitude. Many people I speak to don't like it but more importantly don't need to like it.
As apollo said, the competition is up for it and doing a good job. Greece became too arrogant, now they have had to revert to warm and friendly again because they can't lose the tourism. As we have spoken about many times on here, Spain and Portugal are far cheaper to fly to, closer, food is cheap and plentiful (no rice chips & salad to fill half the plate to hide the miserable portion) - wine, beer and spirits fabulous value - and that's the point, it's like Turkey used to be.
The exchange rate is good, it needs to be.
