MADRID: Arab nations are looking to Chinese visitors to revive their tourism sectors, battered by security fears, and also need to develop homegrown tourism as a lifeline, ministers from the region say.
Bookings to nations in North Africa and the Middle East, which had been recovering after the Arab spring unrest, fell last year following deadly attacks claimed by Islamic extremists in Tunisia and Egypt that caused foreigners to shun beaches and historic sites across the region.
But visitor numbers from China to Egypt soared last year despite a series of security blows to the country’s key tourism sector in 2015 because the government began to allow charter flights from the Asian country, Egyptian Tourism Minister Hisham Zaazou said.
The number of Chinese visitors to Egypt more than doubled from 60,000 in 2014 to 135,000 in 2015, “in a year in which we suffered a lot”, he said at a conference on tourism policies in Arab nations at the Madrid international tourism fair Fitur, which wraps up Sunday.
In September eight Mexican tourists were mistakenly killed by Egyptian security forces in the vast Western Desert.
The following month a Russian airliner crashed in the Sinai desert shortly after taking off from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, killing all 224 people on board.
The Islamic State jihadist group said it downed the aircraft and tens of thousands of foreign tourists, including some 80,000 Russians and 20,000 Britons, were stranded in the resort after flights were cancelled for security reasons.
