[Research column] (Vol.4) Tourism in Egypt may get sick, but it will never die
公開日 2020.12.22
Tourism in Egypt
The importance of Egypt as a tourist destination has increased since the end of the eighteenth century, and this is largely due to several factors, including the French campaign, which restored contact between the Egyptians and their ancient civilization. Scholars accompanying the campaign studied the Egyptian civilization and unveiled many valuable antiquities, and presented Egypt to the West. The French scholars published the Description de l'?gypte which was a series of publications. The publication of those books had directed the attention of European countries to Egypt and its heritage. In 1869 the Egyptian government used the occasion of the opening of the Suez Canal for international navigation to advertising Egypt as a tourist destination. Since that time many roads were paved with stones, tourist destinations were prepared to entertain the guest who attended the opening ceremony.
During the second half of the nineteenth-century travel for leisure became popular among people as Daniel J. Boorstin explains, “foreign travel . . . became . . . a commodity”. Egypt had been promoted by Cook & Son Company as a tourist destination. Egypt became a famous tourist destination outside Europe, that might be because what Edward Said calls “imaginative geographies” regarding the Orient developed in Western scholarship about the Middle East. At that time, the Nile Valley region became the main tourist destination, and many flyers were done representing the ancient Egyptian monument.
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Get sick because of war
In early 1964 an international team of two thousand engineers and archeologists from Egypt, Italy, Sweden, and France sponsored by UNESCO began the monumental task of dismantling Abu simple temple in the south of Egypt. At that time the Egyptian government utilized the occasion of moving the temple of Ramses II by easing visa restrictions for almost all European and North American countries. Unfortunately, due to the war with Israel, most of the Egyptian airports were closed. After peace with Israel was reached, tourism became a focal point of the Five Year Plan of the Government to upgrade the infrastructure of the major tourist destinations. During the 1980s, the Egyptian government recognized the importance of tourism, and at that time, the number of international tourists had increased by 62 per cent, while the Middle East grew by 52 per cent. The Egyptian government established a new strategy which was called Openness Infitā? in Arabic. In this strategy, the new destination had been targeted to be promoted as a tourist destination, Oases in the Western Desert, North coast, Sinai Peninsula, and the Red Sea coast. Until the 1990s only 2 to 3 million tourists visited Egypt each year, about 0.4% of world tourism.
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Get sick because of the terrorist attack and political instability
During the 1990s and with the rise of political Islam, Egypt had experienced several waves of terrorist attacks on “soft” targets such as the tourism sector. The first wave of terrorist attacks occurred during the 1990s. Several attacks occurred in many tourist destinations. After the massacre of the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor in 1998, the tourism industry faced a 56.8 percent decline in the number of nights spent in Egypt. The terrorist attack continued with the new millennium, the terrorist moved their attention from the south of Egypt to the main tourist destination near the capital Cairo and Sinai. However, researchers considered that theese attacks on tourists were generally because of surroiudning political violence and instability.
Although Egyptians considered tourism as an effective tool for economic development, the majority of profits from tourism were directed to foreign companies who had invested their money in Egypt. The government worked hard to develop a new destination and develop infrastructure specifically for tourists and luxurious hotels. Where locals needed basic infrastructures such as water, electricity, and sewage. Tourism development leads to economic inequality, poverty, and hatred against the government and tourists.
The successive political events that began with the January 25 revolution had a significant negative impact on the tourism sector in Egypt. As the number of tourists decreased during the January 25 revolution by more than 37% in that year, dropping from 14.7 million in 2010 to only 8.8 million at the end of 2011, which affected a large scale of businesses that depend directly or indirectly on tourism.
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Get sick because of Corona
In 2019, 13.6 million people visited Egypt, and numbers were expected to exceed 15 million at the beginning of 2020. The growth of the tourism sector during the year 2019 is due to many reasons, including the liberalization of the exchange rate, the preparation of many hotels, as well as security stability. The government also in order to develop the tourism sector, in November 2018 Ministry of Tourism set up a comprehensive reform program for the tourism sector aiming to achieve the goals of sustainable tourism development and raising its competitiveness in line with global trends and increasing the number of workers.
However, in March 2020, the first case of coronavirus was reported at one of the Nile cruise ships on its way from Aswan to Luxor. At the beginning of March, the government decided to close the international borders and close the ports. However, the tourism and aviation sector remained active until the Council of Ministers measures the necessity to restrict travel movement in order to preserve the lives and safety of Egyptians. The worldwide outbreak of COVID-19 has brought the world to a standstill, and tourism has been the worst affected of all major economic sectors. In Egypt tourism industry started to collapse as most of the flights and reservations were canceled. About the collapse, it does not mean only the losses that the major investors in this vital sector bear, but also those suffered by the small workers and the providers of the simplest services. The Egyptian government supported the tourism and private aviation sector to get out of the crisis with some banking measures and decisions that support the continued resilience of its workers until the crisis passes. Unfortunately, the government failed in supporting the small workers in tourism, repeating the same mistake by neglecting the local needs.
The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has started a promoting program to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic by beginning a promotional campaign under the title “Same Great Feelings". The Ministry launched a short film under the title "A Tourist's Journey in Egypt" on Egyptian, Arab, and international social media platforms. On parallel, the ministry but all their priorities put the destinations in top shape and exemplary sanitary conditions. All of that made the number of companies operating in the tourism and travel sector expected an improvement in performance and a strong return after the lifting of the flight ban.
Throughout Egyptian history. The tourism industry has suffered from war, terrorist attacks, and political instability but with these all hopes in tourism, tourism in Egypt gets sick but it will never die. Hope this time Egyptian authorities learned from the past and became more professional in dealing with such kind of problems that tourism always face and might face it in the future.
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Keywords: Tourism development, COVID-19, political instability
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Author: Mina Kamal Asham (Ph.D. student, Wakayama University)
Contact: Minakamal_77[at]hotmail.com
