Tourism

Saudi Arabia: Sustainable Tourism

While Saudi Arabia is pursuing a tourism strategy aimed primarily at domestic and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) visitors, the government is also looking to develop a sustainable base from which the industry can grow. With an estimated 5m Saudis traveling abroad annually and SR6.8bn being spent on outbound tourism, it is understandable why the government is keen on expanding the number of domestic tourism trips from the current 29.6m. The Supreme Commission for Tourism and Antiquities' (SCTA) target is to have 128m internal tourists by 2020, generating some SR101bn in revenue.

NoozzVIEW; Tourism Egypt’s “Achilles’ heel”

The terrorist attack in Egypt demonstrated in a cruel and painful fashion, tourism is, in the words of one diplomat in Cairo, “the Achilles’ heel” of the Egyptian economy – acutely vulnerable to both internal and external pressures. Even though evidence emerged that it was a small Islamist cell behind the bombing near the bustling Khan al-Khalili market that killed a French student and wounded another 24 people – most of them also tourists – it was the first attack on foreigners in the country since 2006, and thus inevitably attracted a host of damaging headlines on newspapers and TV reports around the world. Despite the current financial crisis affecting the tourism sector in general, expectations are that tourism relations between Turkey and the GCC will remain good, and that the number of GCC tourists visiting Turkey - which was up by 15 per cent in 2008 - will continue to increase. Statistics show that more than 18.5 million tourists visited Turkey in the first eight months of 2008, an increase of 15 per cent over the same period in 2007.

NoozzVIEW; Tourists tiptoe back

In what has been another good week for the attempts to return Iraq to some form of normality – despite an ugly spate of new suicide bombings against innocent Shia pilgrims – the first visit by a German Foreign Minister since Berlin opposed the 2003 US-led invasion, has been coincidentally accompanied by an announcement that the first organised tour group from the UK since 2003 is due in Baghdad.