Hilton to manage 7 new hotels in Egypt

CAIRO - 11 November 2017: The Hilton chain, which operates 17 hotels in Egypt, will manage new seven hotels in the country in the coming few years and until 2022, Mohab Ghali, Vice President of Operations for Egypt and North Africa, said Wednesday, according to Reuters.

He said on the sidelines of an investment conference that Hilton targets to increase 2,500 hotel rooms to its current capacity of 6,300 by 2022, increasing them by 40 percent.

Two of the new planned hotels in Egypt will be in the Red Sea resort of Ain Sokhna, Ghali said .

He said that Hilton’s estimates show that the average of hotels’ occupation rates in Egypt increased by 20-25 percent this year, compared to a year earlier. Forty percent of this increase is attributed to Egyptians and domestic tourism, Ghali said.

He added that his hotel expects occupancy rates to increase further in 2018, saying that next year will be better than 2017.

Egypt has been striving to revive the tourism sector, a main foreign currency earner that has been battered by years of instability.

Tourism has been picking up recently; especially that Egypt has now become a cheaper destination for many tourists around the world after floating the local currency.

Tourism revenues jumped 211.8 per cent year-on-year to $5.3 billion in the first nine months of 2017, compared to $1.7 billion the year before.

The number of tourists who visited Egypt in that time jumped 55.3 per cent to 5.9 million, with European visitors reaching 3.2 million, an 85 per cent increase from the previous year.

However, the figures are still below the peak level of 2010 when 14 million tourists visited the country, generating $12.5 billion in revenues.