CAPMAS: Occupancy rates witness a yearly Increase

CAIRO – 24 December 2017: Egypt's Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) reported that the rates of tourists who visited Egypt last November witnessed an increase compared to that of 2016.

"The number of tourists has reached 778,800 tourists last November versus 449,800 in November 2016," read the CAPMAS Newsletter for December.

According to the Central Agency statistics, hotels’ occupancy rates has recorded 8.129 million nights in October 2017, and amounted to 8.150 million nights in November 2017 compared to 3.315 million nights in November 2016.

Meanwhile, occupancy rates in April 2017 increased year-on-year to 45.2 percent, up from 20 percent a year earlier, CAPMAS said.

The tourism sector has been struggling ever since the January 25 Revolution of 2011 and it was recently hit by the downing of a Russian airliner over Sinai in late 2015, which resulted in a Russian and UK travel ban to the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh.

However, tourism has been picking up recently; especially since Egypt has now become a cheaper destination for many tourists around the world after floating the local currency.

Tourism revenues jumped 211.8 per cent year-on-year to $5.3 billion in the first nine months of 2017, compared to $1.7 billion the year before.
The number of tourists who visited Egypt in that time jumped 55.3 per cent to 5.9 million, with European visitors reaching 3.2 million, an 85-percent increase from the previous year.

In this context, Hilton hotels worldwide has announced recently that it aims to increase the number of hotel rooms it manages in Egypt by 40 percent by the end of 2022.