By Heba Saleh and Borzou Daragahi in Cairo
Hisham Zaazou has been Egypt’s tourism minister for 14 months, making him one of the longest serving members of the cabinet. By his own account, it has been a rollercoaster ride.
When appointed last year, his challenge was to convince potential visitors and international travel companies that the then-dominant Muslim Brotherhood had no plans to segregate men and women on beaches or to demolish the pyramids and Sphinx despite calls for such radical measures from some vocal Islamists outside official circles
But now, after the military ousted Mohamed Morsi, the Brotherhood president, and embarked on a bloody crackdown which killed hundreds of his supporters, Mr Zaazou’s biggest hurdle is to persuade the outside world that Egypt is safe to visit.
To that end, he helped free two Canadians held inside an Egyptian jail for weeks, convinced pro-military channels to stop broadcasting “Egypt: War against Terror” logos on their screens 24 hours a day and struggled to convince other countries to remove travel advisories warning their nationals not to visit.
“There is no place on earth where it’s 100 per cent safe,” he tells the Financial Times, citing the terrorist attack on the Boston marathon last year.
Egypt’s ancient monuments and upmarket beach resorts have long attracted tourists, helping fill foreign currency coffers and providing jobs. But a low-level Islamist insurgency against police and mass killings of pro-Morsi protesters by security forces have fed perceptions that the country is on the brink of chaos, damaging a tourism industry that has been suffering since the January 2011 revolution.
Mr Zaazou calls the losses “quite catastrophic”, especially among those working in the cultural sector. “Their suffering is not from the day the recent travel advisories were issued, but rather starting from January 25, 2011,” he says. “There was no real upswing period.” He said however he has high hopes that tourism will recover in the next few months . The minister, a technocrat with a decades-long record in the industry, is taking heart from the fact that at least 12 countries, most of them in Europe, have lifted or eased negative travel advisories calling on their citizens to avoid some parts or the whole of Egypt.
“Seventy per cent of the business in recent years has been in the Red Sea and the Southern Sinai, and these areas, as far as the reports that I have, and the proof I have, are quite safe,” says Mr Zaazou. “I am saying quite, and not 100 per cent, because I’ll be honest: there is no place on earth where you can say, there is zero risk there. We did our homework at least for this part of Egypt and I can start promoting it.”
Tourism accounts for about 4m jobs in Egypt, according to Mr Zaazou, but the industry has been hit hard by the turmoil since the 2011 revolt which toppled Hosni Mubarak as president. Visitors peaked at 14.7m in 2010, bringing in $12.5bn in revenue. After dipping in 2011 to 9m and $8.8bn in revenue, the figures started to climb in 2012 to reach 11.5m tourists and $10bn in revenue.
Hotels and tour operators have had to drop their prices and attracted more frugal visitors who spend less on tips, souvenirs and optional extras, cutting deep into the incomes of many whose livelihoods depend on tourism. The average amount spent per tourist per night has fallen from $85 to $63, says Mr Zaazou.
Street fighting between police and demonstrators in Cairo has scared away visitors to the capital and all but destroyed cultural tourism centred on the Pharaonic monuments. Visitors who used to come to see the pyramids would then proceed to the south, where they travelled by Nile cruise boats between Luxor and Aswan, home of ancient archeological sites such as the Valley of the Kings. Only 30 of the 280 cruise ships that usually sail on the Nile are operating, and their occupancy is just 4 per cent.
To bypass troubles in Cairo, Mr Zaazou has signed a deal with Sun Express to fly tourists from German cities directly to Luxor, promoting Nile cruises as combination sun and cultural tours.
Around 72 per cent of Egyptian tourists come from Europe, including 2.5m Russians who frequent Red Sea resorts. But Mr Zaazou says he is eager to draw back big-spending US and Canadian tourists scared off by perceptions of rising anti-American hostility. In 2010, 361,000 Americans visited. “Today there are very little,” Mr Zaazou says, with dismay. “I would say closer to zero.”
Many countries and large travel companies follow the lead of the US, which has kept in place a draconian travel advisory warning Americans to avoid Egypt. Part of the problem, the minister concedes, are private pro-military television channels overtly hostile to President Barack Obama, who has called for Egypt to return to democracy. At recent pro-military rallies, protesters held up signs denigrating the US president.
“This cliché that Egyptians are anti-American does not help me promote tourism,” Mr Zaazou says. “We need to have a PR campaign in the US to to try and change the impression about the Egyptians and the relationship between Egypt and Americans.”
The minister’s job will not be helped by the death in custody in recent days of James Henry Dunn, a 66-year-old American, who allegedly hung himself in a prison cell in the Suez Canal city of Ismailiya. He had been held since August on curfew violation charges.
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