Germany’s leading travel and tourism Company TUI has announced on Friday plans to increase arrivals to Egypt in 2020 by 20-25 percent compared to 2019.
TUI recently noticed the growing demand for flights to Egypt, prompting the company to expands its flight options accordingly, a source close to the company told Egyptian newspaper.
The number of German visitors to Egypt has already grown by 20 percent during the first month of this year, the source said.
Colliers International showed in a recent report that German tourists spent the most in Egypt in 2019. Meanwhile, the number of German visitors soared from 707,000 in 2018 to 2.5 million in 2019.
German tourists spent $1.22 billion in the North African country that year, and by 2024, total projected spending is expected to climb to $2.18 billion, according to figures provided by the Arabian Travel Market.
Egypt’s tourism sector will witness a remarkable boost in 2020, thanks to the German market and efforts to tighten security measures and promote the tourism industry internationally. This comes after years of political instability and a 2015 bombing of a Russian jetliner led to flight bans to Egypt’s Red Sea resorts and a fall in the number of foreign arrivals.
Global excitement for the much-anticipated opening of the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza may be partially a factor for the growing demand for trips to Egypt, especially from Germans, according to an economic adviser.
In an interview with the MENA News Agency, Saeed al-Batouti, an economic adviser at the World Tourism Organization and member of the UN Economic Commission for Europe said Egypt’s tourism sector has significantly recuperated. It claimed 13 million tourists having visited Egypt in 2019, up significantly from 7.5 million in 2017, al-Batouti added.
He predicts 15 million people would visit Egypt in 2020.
The improvement is due to efforts by the political leadership to support the tourism industry and tighten security measures at airports across the country, al-Batouti said. A report by Reuters has also highlighted the flotation of the Egyptian pound in 2016, which reduced its value by half, as another attractive point for foreign visitors.
Egypt had witnessed a 177 percent growth in the number of North American visitors in 2018, according to Intrepid.
Meanwhile, total tourism receipts in Egypt, or expenditures made by inbound visitors to the country, reached $16.4 billion in 2019. Yet, spending from foreign visitors to the country is expected to reach 29.7 billion by 2024, according to Danielle Curtis, Exhibition Director ME at the Arabian Travel Market.
Source: Egypt Independent
