Tourists are slowly returning to Egypt, easing pressure on a key sector battered by years of turmoil and the 2015 bombing of an aircraft carrying Russian holidaymakers.
“There is an increase in the number of tourists. This situation was much better in January than in previous years,” Egyptian Ministry of Tourism spokeswoman Omaima al-Husseini said.
Visitors from China, Japan and Ukraine account for a large part of the growth.
Photo: AFP
China’s top public travel agency, China International Travel Service, reported a 58 percent increase in tourists flying to Egypt compared with 2015.
“There are more bookings between October 2016 and January 2017 than last year,” Egyptian Federation of Tourism president Karim Mohsen said. “There is an improvement, especially in cultural tourism in Cairo, Luxor and Aswan.”
The uptick is a sign of hope for a country also reeling from the shock of an economic reform program that has triggered massive inflation.
Once a key foreign-currency earner, the tourism sector crashed in 2011 after a popular uprising overthrew former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, ushering in years of sporadic unrest.
Recoveries in the sector since then have been set back by new crises.
In June 2015, a massacre of tourists at a Luxor temple was narrowly averted when assailants armed with assault rifles and explosives bungled the attack and were intercepted by police.
However, in October that year, Islamic State group militants, who are waging an insurgency in the eastern Sinai Peninsula, struck again. They bombed a Russian airliner carrying holidaymakers home from the popular Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
All 224 people aboard were killed.
Russia suspended flights to Egypt and Britain cut air links with Sharm el-Sheikh.
Visitor numbers plunged from 9.3 million in 2015 to 5.3 million the following year, Husseini said.
However, Egyptian tourism industry officials have cautiously welcomed what they say is a noticeable improvement since October last year.
In December last year, 551,600 tourists visited Egypt compared with 440,000 the year before, according to the government’s statistics agency.
“Activity has picked up a bit in the winter of 2016 to 2017,” said Tamer al-Shaer, vice president of the Blue Sky travel agency.
That included a 30 percent increase in Ukrainian tourists and a 60 percent increase in visitors from China, with daily flights to Aswan, a southern city rich in ancient sites, he said.
Japan’s HIS travel agency said the number of tourists heading to Egypt “multiplied by four to five times” last year.
Since charter flights from Japan to Egypt resumed in April last year, they have been on average 80 percent full, a spokesman for the Japan Association of Travel agents said.
Egypt hosted a record 14.7 million foreign tourists in 2010, a year before Mubarak’s overthrow and the ensuing economic nosedive.
Restoring even two thirds of that number is a key government goal, but it hinges on Russia and Britain resuming flights, Husseini said.
“There are ongoing negotiations ... we hope the issue will be resolved as soon as possible,” she said.
More than 60 percent of tourists arriving in Sharm el-Sheikh by plane used to come from Britain or Russia.
“So long as the Russians do not come back, there will be paralysis,” Mohsen said. “Russians and Britons are the backbone of Sharm el-Sheikh.”
Other European countries such as Germany and France have registered a slight increase in reservations to Egypt.
Early this month, four other European countries — Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden — eased travel warnings against travel to south Sinai, where Sharm el-Sheikh and other resorts are situated.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”