13 Jun 2021

The Minister of Tourism and Antiquities announced that Egypt has received around 2mn tourists in the first five months of 2021. This represents 40% of the traffic that was received in the same period in 2019, a year which represents Egypt’s traditional inflow of tourists well before the pandemic hit. The total number of tourists received in 2019 was 13mn. The minister expects the tourism sector to fully recover by mid-2022.

He credited Egypt’s professionally-applied Covid preventative measures as contributing to the return of tourists to Egypt. Part of these measures was the successful vaccination of all employees in the tourism sector and related industries in Egypt’s two main tourist attraction cities and regions in the Red Sea and South Sinai governorates. Furthermore, he revealed that the government has hired a British-Canadian company to formulate a global media advertising strategy for Egyptian tourism which should be completed in early July 2021. The promotional campaign will run for 3 years at a cost of USD90mn. (Source: Official State Information Service, al-Ahram (English) (Arabic), al-Youm al-Saabe, al-Shurouk)