According to the news of the tourism news Center, which is the news source of the tourism sector in Turkey, In September 2022, a citizen named Serhat Özkan, who wanted to make an online reservation to the 5-star Orange County Resort in Kemer district of Antalya, the capital of tourism, clicked on the single male option and the site gave a warning to contact our tour authorities.
Özkan, who realized that a reservation could be made when she tried the one-woman option, learned that one-man or two-man accommodations were possible in luxury rooms when she called and inquired about the matter, and that the hotel only accepted one man and one woman and more than one woman, applied to the Human Rights and Equality Institution of Turkey (TİHEK), an independent administrative institution, by taking the audio recording of the conversation and the screenshot of the reservation that could not be made online. TİHEK unanimously found the applicant's claim of gender discrimination justified and imposed an administrative fine of 89,571 liras each on the hotel and the tour company Jolly Tour.
In the decision, which states that there is no objective and reasonable reason why a single woman or a couple can rent a standard room while a single man is forced to rent a luxury room due to his gender, and that the hotel and the tour company discriminate against men, the defense of the company named Jolly Tour that they are not responsible for discrimination, that they only implement the hotel's instructions, and that it is not their decision not to allow male accommodation is not accepted, and Jolly Tour was fined at the upper limit for implementing the unlawful discriminatory instruction.
Serhat Özkan, who made the application to TİHEK, said the following in his statement on the subject:
''They have made gender discrimination the rule. When you look closely, they are supposedly trying to create a safe space for women, but when you look from afar, this policy carries water to the mill of the establishment masculinity. The pink bus, women's universities, the rise of familist policies, all feed from the same place. Family hotels, family restaurants, family tea gardens, putting the label "family" on the name of a place already indicates who cannot enter the place rather than who can. The practice is ostensibly discrimination against men, but it is actually the product of an archaic mentality that sees women as the appendage of men. If the Ministry of Culture and Tourism had not turned a blind eye, the ban on women-free vacations would not have dominated the market. Even if this is to be implemented as a business concept, the number of hotels operating under this concept should not exceed a certain percentage. There is no such imposition in Europe, only in Turkey. Isolating single men or pairs of men in order to create a safe space for women is not a rule required by biological laws as it is supposed to be. Foreign media outlets such as the NZ Herald and The Sun ridicule this state of Turkish tourism.''
Stating that the fine imposed by TİHEK was paid to the state as it was an administrative fine and that he was not compensated, Serhat Özkan stated that he would file a lawsuit for moral damages against these lawbreakers.
Minister Ersoy's company was also fined for the same reason
In 2022, TİHEK also fined ETS Tur, the company of Minister of Culture and Tourism Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, for gender discrimination upon the application of Hasan Onur Akay and Feray Çağıl.
