 | After a very harsh 2020 that was full of disasters and gloom due to the coronavirus pandemic, 2021 was a satisfactory year for Egypt’s tourism in comparison with the rest of the global tourism industry.
There is no official data for 2021 arrivals, but according to the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, the number of visitors steadily rose, and the demand for Egypt’s tourist destinations increased.
Air travel to Egypt also resumed from many important countries in 2021. Russia resumed flights to Egypt’s Red Sea resort cities of Sharm El-Sheikh and Hurghada on 9 August after a six-year hiatus.
On 9 November, restrictions on regular and charter flights from various Russian cities wishing to operate flights to Egypt were also lifted.
On 9 October, Sharm El-Sheikh received its first flight coming from London after flights were suspended twice — once from 2015 till February 2020 and once again from March 2020 till October 2021.
Despite all these achievements, challenges posed by the ongoing pandemic remain, and so, Daily News Egypt decided to dig further into the expectations of the tourism sector in 2022.
Said Al-Batouty — an UNWTO economic adviser, member of the UN Economic Commission for Europe, and board member of the German Travel Association — told Daily News Egypt that a good reason to be optimistic is that Egypt is one of the first tourist destinations in which recovery has started.
He said that the final figures for 2021 are not available, but he would expect that the number of tourists who visited Egypt during 2021 amounted to about 4.5m tourists, and it is expected that the number will increase during 2022 to reach about 7m tourists — assuming the pandemic does not develop — and if this happens, Egypt will achieve about $7.2bn in tourism revenues | | |