Steadily increasing its appeal for tourists worldwide, İstanbul saw the number of foreign visitors in January increase by 18 percent over the same month a year ago, reaching more than 532,000, data from the local tourism office showed on Monday.

According to data provided by the İstanbul Culture and Tourism Directorate on Monday, İstanbul hosted 532,726 foreign visitors in the first month of this year. One interesting detail in the data was that the number of tourists who arrived in İstanbul by sea had increased by 400 percent in the same period. Observers pointed to increasing cruise-ship traffic to İstanbul over the past months.

In the list of countries that sent the highest number of visitors to İstanbul in January, 7.7 percent came from Germany, followed by Russia with 7.3 percent and the UK with 4.1 percent. The US came in fourth with 4 percent while the North African country of Libya made it into the top five in the list with 3.9 percent.

Evaluating the figures, directorate manager Ahmet Emre Bilgili said the early encouraging figures will boost morale in the city’s tourism sector and that İstanbul looked to attract even more visitors this year compared to 2012. The number of visitors to İstanbul hit 9.5 million in 2012, with authorities expecting this figure exceed 10 million this year.