Tourists visiting Egypt to reach 12M in 2018: Travco Chairman

CAIRO – 10 March 2018: Tourist flows to Egypt will see an increase of 40-50 percent year-on-year in the 2018/19 season, Hamed el-Chiaty, Chairman of Travco Group said Saturday.

He said that Egypt’s participation in the recently-held ITB Berlin will yield positive results.
Chiaty said that there will be new inflows from the British and Ukrainian markets, and from other new markets including Latvia, Hungry and Lithuania.

He added that charter flights will be operated from these markets to Egypt’s tourist cities, expecting that these markets will export big numbers of tourists in the coming period.

Chiaty expected number of tourists to reach 12 million by the end of 2018, stressing on the importance of improving the services rendered to tourists and enhancing the capacities of workers in the tourism sector.

He also shed light on the important role of the Tourism Ministry in supervising hotels to measure the quality of services provided to tourists, saying that penalties should be imposed if hotels do not commit to the required measures.

On Travco’s expansion, Chiaty announced the opening of four new hotels in the Red Sea’s Marsa Alam in 2018, saying that it is the favorite city to Italian and British tourists.


The Red Sea resort of Marsa Alam - Pixabay

He added that his company succeeded in bringing more than one million tourists by the end of 2017, saying that this figure will increase in light of the company’s plan for 2018.

During her participation in ITB Berlin, the world's largest tourism trade fair, Tourism Minister Rania al-Mashat said that the tourism sector in Egypt is on the way to regain its boom.

She said there are positive indicators towards tourism recovery, including is the increase of reservations in Egypt during the next season.

Egypt’s tourism revenues jumped 123.5 percent year-on-year to $7.6 billion in 2017, a government official said in January.

He said that the number of tourists who visited Egypt in that time jumped 54 percent to 8.3 million.

Tourism is one of Egypt’s main foreign currency earners, but it has suffered several blows since the 25 January Revolution of 2011, the latest of which was the downing of a Russian plane over Sinai in late 2015.

After the crash, Russia, which exports the largest number of tourists to Egypt, has banned all flights to Egypt.

However an agreement signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in January approving the resumption of air traffic between Russia and Cairo, should see flights between both states resuming soon.

Flotation of the Egyptian pound in November 2016 has also benefited tourism as Egypt has now become a cheaper destination for many tourists around the world.

Reaping the fruits of the flotation, Egypt’s 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 percent increase from the previous year.

Despite the pickup in tourism recently, the numbers are still below the peak level of 2010 when 14 million tourists visited the country, generating $12.5 billion in revenues.