For Business Owners

Under the Regulation on Commercial Advertising and Unfair Commercial Practices, platforms like Şikayetvar must verify reviews before publishing them and must also give the business 72 hours to respond. Google, however, currently has no direct verification obligation under Turkish law, which is why anyone can rate you there — but you can still exercise your right of reply on Google too. Separately, you can apply to have reviews older than one year removed.

The review legislation contains no explicit provision on this, but simply taking over or leasing the business does not by itself make it a new facility. If you have changed both the name and the concept, you can have a new page opened.

The Ministry of Trade has recently been placing greater emphasis on registering websites that sell goods or services online with ETBİS (the Electronic Commerce Information System). If your hotel's website takes bookings or accepts payments directly, you may need to register. The process is straightforward and is done via e-Devlet (Türkiye's e-government portal) by an authorised company representative. After registering, you log in, click "Create Site" and enter your hotel website's details; the system then generates a QR code for you, which you must place in your site's footer.

ETBİS registration and QR code video (in Turkish) — for details see the Ministry's page

According to a statement by the Revenue Administration of the Ministry of Treasury and Finance, it does not matter whose credit or debit card is used to pay for the service. Revenue Administration statement (in Turkish)

Yes. Under Article 17 of the Travel Agencies Regulation, agencies must — for consumer information purposes in their marketing and sales activities — display the licence number from their Ministry-issued operating licence together with the agency's registered name on the landing page of their online sales channels, and at the bottom of every other page.

Yes — but selling bus tickets requires an authorisation certificate from the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure: F1 for domestic routes and F2 for international routes. See the certificate types page (in Turkish) for details. Selling without the certificate exposes you to administrative penalties.

Yes. Under Communiqué No. 2008-32/34 on Decree No. 32 on the Protection of the Value of the Turkish Currency, accommodation service contracts concluded with Türkiye residents at properties licensed by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism may be indexed to foreign currency.

No — the Identity Sharing System (KPS) and the Identity Notification System are two different things. As a hotelier, you must join the General Directorate of Security's Identity Notification System, or else report guest identities to law enforcement manually.

The Identity Sharing System, by contrast, belongs to the General Directorate of Civil Registration and Citizenship. Its website states that it can be used by:

• Legal entities providing public services,
• Insurance and pension companies operating under the Insurance Law No. 5684,
• Banks operating under the Banking Law No. 5411,
• Financial leasing and financing companies under Law No. 6361.

Among the organisations currently using the service, no private-law entities other than banks/financial institutions, insurance companies and hospitals have been observed. (Current KPS institution list (in Turkish))

No. For 2026, intermediaries who broker the tourism rental of homes lacking a permit face an administrative fine of 180,617 TL per contract. The same fine applies where a rental is not delivered to the user under the conditions stated in the contract, and again where misleading promotion is made or the conditions promised in vouchers, brochures and other promotional materials (including duration) are not met. You should therefore proceed only after securing the permit applications and permits for every property in your portfolio that you broker or plan to broker. Track the outcomes of pending applications too — the Regulation requires a legible copy of the permit to be published everywhere the property is marketed.

First: even if you hold a Group A agency licence, you absolutely must obtain a separate authorisation — check the USHAŞ (International Health Services) page for this. Before operating, you must sign protocols with at least 3 healthcare institutions, and not just any clinics — they must meet specific criteria. If you skip these steps, the consequences include: suspension of your health-tourism activities, referral to the Ministry of Trade, ministry-level inspections with all the administrative sanctions consumer law provides, and an administrative fine of up to half of the previous month's gross service revenue, with a floor of 250,000 Turkish lira — and that's just for starters.

Yes. As a rule, the person who paid has the say over the reservation. However, as the agency you must notify the other guest — in this case the boyfriend — and if he wishes to keep the stay, give him a payment window to pay for it himself, holding the reservation in the meantime.

Yes, charging the current price would be a problem. If the remaining guest is made to pay more than the original booking price merely because the person who paid wants to cancel, a court or consumer arbitration committee may well treat this as an unfair commercial term.

Make sure your contract with the hotel states that uploading accurate images is the hotel's responsibility and that the hotel will cover any resulting losses. In Advertisement Board meeting No. 344 (File No. 2024/2621), the fine for hotel images on an agency's website was imposed on the hotel, not the agency. The reasoning: the images used in the property's promotions were found not to match reality, and consumers were misled by them. Naturally, the assessment may differ from case to case.

The certificates alone are not enough. The licensed carriers whose tickets you plan to sell must also grant you consent via e-Devlet, authorising you to act as their ticketing agent.

Under the regulation, you first count the bedrooms: each bedroom counts as capacity for 2 people. On top of the bedroom capacity, you may add at most two more guests, provided you supply suitable equipment for them. So if your two double beds are in bedrooms, that gives a capacity of 4; even if the sofa could sleep 5, the home's maximum capacity is 6. If the sofa bed is a single, the capacity is 5.

Will you market the property yourself, or through an agency's page? If yourself, publish a legible copy of the permit on the page where you advertise; if through an agency, send it to them to publish.

Your listing must include: location, capacity, bed details (single/double), the home's equipment including internet availability, whether pets are accepted, and — for homes within a complex or apartment building — information on the rules adopted by the building management.

Yes. If the tourism residence is an apartment-type unit or, as in your case, a separated part of a detached house, the floor information must also appear in your listing.

No. Under the regulation, a tourism residence may accommodate a maximum of 12 guests; exceeding that can result in penalties.

No. Under Article 37/A of the Tourism Incentive Law No. 2634 and Article 16(2) of the Regulation on the Qualifications of Tourism Facilities, a facility must be promoted in accordance with its Ministry of Culture and Tourism licence. Where a Ministry-licensed facility's municipal operating permit shows a different name and type, promotion must be based on the name and type in the tourism licence. Read together with the obligations to give consumers accurate information and to avoid promotion that could mislead or damage the country's tourism, the Ministry of Trade treats promotion under the permit wording as deceptive and misleading to consumers, and can impose administrative sanctions and fines.

Advertising an award on its own — without publishing when it was won, which organisation awarded it and how many candidates there were — is risky. Moreover, as of 2025 nearly 10 years have passed, so the award may well be considered no longer current.

No. In this kind of SEO work you cannot use other businesses' trade names and trademarks — if you do, the Ministry of Trade will impose sanctions on you.

No. Be very careful with reviews: if you present users with a "Yes, I liked it" option, you must present a "No, I didn't like it" option that is just as easy to use. Otherwise the Ministry of Trade will impose sanctions on you.

Health tourism advertising must not be demand-generating; websites must be designed accordingly and notified to the Ministry of Health. We strongly recommend obtaining a lawyer's opinion after preparing the ad but before publishing it.

Under the legislation, a pension must have at least three rooms.

No — don't. Under the Identity Notification Law and its regulation, having taken over the business, you are now responsible for the previous operator's registers too, and the same regulation requires reservation registers to be kept for 5 years starting from the year after the year they relate to.