“We don’t accommodate two men”: where did gender discrimination in Turkish hotels come from?

When booking a hotel in Turkey before the New Year, another incident occurred, one of those that Russians are already tired of complaining about – refusal to allow two men to share the same room. But this time the refuseniks turned out to be quarrelsome and went to court, which made the New Year holidays significantly easier for gentlemen who prefer to relax without ladies.

Details and reasons for gender tricks at popular resorts were revealed to us by employees of hotels that do not allow single men or women.

There are many cases of refusal to check into a hotel on the basis of gender – both at the booking stage and in fact – in the history of post-pandemic tourism, but hotels in Turkish and Egyptian resorts are the ones that are most often heard. At the same time, in Turkey, without a clear explanation of the reasons, men who wanted to share a room were not accommodated, and in Egypt, women, including those applying for a single, were not accommodated. The complaints of ordinary tourists both there and there were useless, until on the Egyptian Mediterranean near Alexandria they refused to accommodate a “lonely lady”, not recognizing her as a fairly famous actress in the country.

“The company that invited me to the event booked the room for me,” explains Nglaa Badr, an Egyptian actress. “But when I arrived, they refused to check in, citing the fact that their hotel is only for family guests, and I arrived without my husband. And not only me, but also other women who arrived unaccompanied by men were not allowed into that hotel.

However, Nglaa did not simply give up: she wrote on all her social networks about the discrimination of “single women” by hotels in her country and appeared on a television talk show, after which the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities was simply attacked by ladies with similar complaints. And then the Minister of Tourism was forced to publicly announce that “there is no reason why hotels should prevent women from booking rooms.”

“In this way they wanted to prevent ladies of a certain type from receiving married men in hotel rooms,” admits Ziba, an employee of one of the hotels near Alexandria.

And in the days before the New Year, a “high-profile refusenik” ambushed Turkey: in a hotel in Kemer, two men were refused check-in at the booking stage, without noticing that they were quite well-known personalities in the country – lawyer Ferat Cagil and academician Hasan Akayv. These two did not silently accept the refusal and, instead of the resort, went straight to court, where they filed a lawsuit against the hotel so that it attracted the attention of the Turkish Institute for Human Rights and Equality, which, in turn, initiated a large-scale audit. As a result, not only the hotel in Kemer that refused to “single men” was fined for gender discrimination, but also the national tourism industry. Today, male and female couples who have previously received refusals in Turkey and Egypt are testing hotels for “same-sex reservations” and are so far satisfied.

We ask the staff of “those” establishments that discriminated against tourists based on gender about the obvious and hidden reasons for such behavior.

“People have been complaining about our “family” hotels for a long time,” says Fatima, a Russian-speaking administrator of one of the Kemeri hotels. – People stay in one double room not because they are gay, but so as not to pay for two singles.

– So they don’t move in two men precisely because they are afraid of gays?

– Officially, this is formulated as follows: “The hotel reserves the right to unconditionally cancel the reservation of a double room for male guests, since they may not be comfortable in a family-type hotel.” Officially, but in words, it is added that men’s groups, unaccompanied by women, can get busy in bars, behave noisily, pester lonely tourists and all that. But still, we, who work in hotels, see that female tourists unaccompanied by men are capable of this, and even more, but they are allowed in. But we don’t house two men and that’s it. So the true, but hushed up reason, of course, is different. Muslim families and their children who will gather on the coast during the New Year holidays should not see male couples.

– But now, after the trial committed by your VIPs, they will still see you!

– So it seems. The couples in question are now checking a list online of hotels that do not welcome them. And they won’t go there, even if formally they are now allowed to go everywhere. There are only two such hotels in Antalya, one in Marmaris, but in Belek, Side, Kemer and Alanya – 10 each. Simply because these resorts are more popular with Turkish families with children.