Eye on the Prize

 Home to the one of the seven ancient wonders of the world; hugged by not one, but two seas with beach-lined coasts; warm sunny weather almost all year round: There’s a lot to love about Egypt as a tourist destination. Which is why tourism has consistently been one of the nation’s top generators of foreign currency over the past decade. International coverage of protests and clashes post revolution have taken their toll, however, with the number of visitors and tourism revenues in 2011 down by about 33 percent, compared to 2010 figures. It was a drastic reversal after years of steady increases, with 2011’s 9.8 million visitors the lowest since 2006, according to the Central Agency for Public Mobilization & Statistics. While there is a push for more Egyptians to travel within Egypt, domestic tourism only accounts for about 16 percent of total tourism activity. Minister of Tourism Mounir Fakhry Abdel Nour still has his eye on the big prize: the recovery and expansion of the nation’s foreign tourism industry. In an Egypt Today exclusive, he talks about the future of tourism in Egypt and why it is so important not only to us, but to the region. Edited excerpts: What are the priorities for the Ministry of Tourism right now? The Ministry of Tourism is primarily a regulator, but it is also the institution that plans, that promotes, that advertises, that sets the strategy, be it the marketing or the executive strategies. My priority is to set the proper climate and atmosphere to be able to bring back the flow of tourism to where it was back in 2010. In 2010, Egypt received 14.7 million tourists, which generated a total revenue of some $12.5 billion. After the revolution, the tourism sector was negatively affected, obviously. The number of tourists went down 33% to 9.8 million tourists. Revenues went down to close to $8.75 billion. I have to create the proper atmosphere to recoup what has been lost. Realistically, how long do you think it will take tourism to recover and exceed 2010’s figures? What needs to happen in the country to do this and what is the Ministry of Tourism doing to help it? The prerequisite is security — calm, law and order prevailing all over the country. And this is a political process. It takes time. I don’t think the Ministry of Tourism can in any way affect this process. The only thing we can do is take advantage of the improving situation. For the last month (February and early March) the situation, at least in the street, has been calm. We’re taking advantage of this to tell the world that security prevails. And we’re seeing an immediate improvement in the figures. How long will it take? We have a medium-term plan, which is very precise and very focused: We want to double the number of tourists by 2017. That is, to be able to host, by 2017, some 30 million tourists and generate an income of $25 billion. I think it will happen. Some in the travel industry believe we should stop aggressively trying to bring tourists in at a time when safety is an issue. Instead, we should focus on totally revamping the tourism industry on all levels — customer service, safety, quality — and then as tourism picks up, Egypt emerges with a new brand as a premiere destination based on all of the improvements.  You can do both at the same time. I don’t think you — or any market, for that matter — can afford to withdraw from the market. It’s a golden rule: You have to always be present. And you can upgrade your services, you can revamp whatever you have to revamp without withdrawing.   I think in this part of the world, the industry of tourism cannot survive in the absence of Egypt. Egypt, to give you an example, represents 30 percent of the outbound tourism activity of Italy. This percentage is probably the same in many other European, Western or Eastern European countries. So it is neither in the interest of the industry nor in the interest of Egypt for it to withdraw for any reason. And this does not prohibit Egypt to do, in parallel, the necessary revamping or upgrading of its services. This is precisely what we’re doing. We’re spending huge amounts of money for training at all levels. We are currently applying the NN system, which is the New Norms for hotel classification. This requires a huge investment. We are launching green tourism. In fact, we’re turning Sharm El-Sheikh into a green city as a first step, and this will be replicated everywhere, in Hurghada and elsewhere. It requires huge investments because we’re replacing traditional sources of energy with renewable ones. We are trying to save on the consumption of water, we are using new techniques for the disposal of waste, etc. We’re doing this and many other things, including restarting the long Nile cruises between Aswan and Cairo, which requires huge investment to upgrade the docks on the Nile. And we’re doing all this while at the same time promoting, advertising, communicating, inviting people to come back — and they are coming back. How will you keep tourists coming back? My vision for the Ministry of Tourism is to diversify our products and launch new products [in areas] like religious tourism, sports tourism, desert tourism, ecological tourism, in addition to beach and cultural tourism. I also feel that Egypt can very quickly become a rehabilitation center in the Arab world. We need to promote wellness and wellness tourism. We need to diversify our markets. Our growth will not come from our traditional markets, the Western European and Eastern European countries. I think we should get off the beaten path, we should go East — knock at the door of China, India, South Korea, Vietnam — and West — Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and all the other up-and-coming economic forces of this world. The third thing we need to do is upgrade services, create centers of excellence of real five-star hotel accommodations and services. I strongly believe we have all the resources that will allow us to reach our target to double the number of tourists by 2017 and to reach the figure of 30 million tourists. Recent incidents involving tourists in Sinai have shown that not everyone is happy with the way tourism development has been implemented over the years. The Bedouins, for example, feel they have not had a stake in the development of Sinai. How is the Ministry of Tourism addressing this? We do appreciate that Bedouins have not benefited from tourism development in Sinai. I think they should become stakeholders in one way or another. We are trying to give Bedouins plots of land for them to have their own tourist villages that they can manage. We are creating — as a matter of fact, it’s under construction in the desert — a small village for them to sell their local products to the tourists. We are trying to form a company, where Bedouins would be the shareholders, that will organize camel races, and we’re creating a racetrack for the camels. This can be very profitable for them, but also as far as tourism is concerned, it will be an additional attraction for tourists. In 2005, there was the “Tourism is Good for Us All” campaign telling people to treat tourists respectfully and to not take advantage of them. Is there a plan to renew the customer service awareness campaign? Absolutely. It’s in the pipeline. As a matter of fact, the old films, which were very good, have been sent to the different television channels and they should be aired anytime now. We’ve been given quite a generous budget to finance this campaign. From the Ministry of Tourism’s standpoint as a regulatory agency, what does the ministry do to help preserve the environment? A lot of things. For instance, last year, fishermen tried to get into [a protected area] and start fishing. We interfered: We asked the Ministry of Environment to stop them, but we realized there was a need for compensation for these fishermen, and we financed this compensation entirely. We’re very respectful of the areas that should be preserved. And we have very strict regulations with regards to the density of construction, the heights of the buildings, etc. Our cooperation with the Ministry of Environment is very, very close — we work hand in hand.