CAIRO — “We’ve missed you,” Egypt’s ministry of tourism says in its new advertising campaign, a plaintive plea for summer visitors from wealthy countries in the Persian Gulf.
That
is putting it mildly. For three years now, political turmoil has scared
many travelers away from Egypt, leaving millions of people whose
livelihoods depend on visitors desperate for any sign of an end to the
most sustained tourism crisis anyone here can recall.
At Cosmos,
a 37-year-old tour company in Cairo that used to serve up to 30,000
customers a year, Khaled M. Ismail, the company’s director of
operations, said he had not booked a single visitor since May 2013. The
company’s once-hectic headquarters are deserted most of the time:
Employees come in only once a week, to pay the bills. “We’re not
expecting any business until 2015,” Mr. Ismail said, sitting alone in
his office one recent weekday.
The
loss of tourism has taken a disastrous toll on the economy, starving
the country of income and badly needed foreign currency. Now many people
in Egypt talk not just about short-term pain but long-term damage, as
workers forsake years of training and experience to hunt for new jobs
outside the industry, and students abandon what had been the country’s
most promising career track.
Others,
though, are holding out, nervously watching their nest eggs dwindle as
they wait for things to improve. “What was saved has been spent,” said
Raafat Ferghani Khattab, a guide in Cairo who called tourism the family
business.
Mr.
Khattab, whose grandfather showed a Swedish king the sights in the
early 20th century, said tourism was “the nerve system of the middle
class.” It is not just families like his that are suffering, he said;
the ripples from the crisis have affected people like the farmers who
supply organic fruit to hotels, and even pharmacists with shops in
resort areas. “They are back to square one,” he said.
There
is little relief in sight. Egypt’s political struggles turned
increasingly violent after the ouster of the elected Islamist president,
Mohamed Morsi, last July. Hundreds of protesters have been killed by
the security services, and militants have carried out deadly attacks on
soldiers, police officers and civilians. Holiday makers were directly
caught up in violence for the first time in about three years in
February, when militants bombed a bus filled with South Korean visitors in a Sinai resort town, killing four people.
Tourism
officials who tried last year to persuade the world that fears about
Egypt were overblown are turning now to increasingly imaginative
pitches, like promoting a spiritual retreat in a Cairo park, meant to
sell a country that until recently sold itself.
Having
given up on trying to attract business from the United States or many
European countries, officials have focused instead on Arab tourists,
hoping that regional good will and nostalgia for Egypt will trump
concerns about safety. “They are comfortable here,” Rasha al-Azaizy, a
tourism ministry spokeswoman, said of Arab visitors, who traditionally
made up a fifth of Egypt’s tourists. The government is also taking aim
at more unlikely markets, including Latvia, perhaps in the hope that
adventurous tourists are to be found there.
In
2010, before the political crisis, almost 15 million foreign tourists
visited Egypt, officials said; last year the figure fell to 9.5 million.
Most of the visitors these days are beachgoers who avoid Cairo and
other cultural destinations, limiting the reach of the money they spend.
But the resort business is under threat, too, after the attack on the
bus in Sinai, which was quickly followed by travel warnings from several
European countries.
The
crisis has been a boon to a trickle of travelers who have ignored the
warnings and found five-star hotel accommodations available for a song
close to prime beaches and historic sites.
At
the same time, workers at Egypt’s most famous attractions have had to
get used to an unsettling quiet. At the pyramids in Giza, hawkers seem
to outnumber tourists most mornings by about 10 to one. In the Egyptian
Museum in Cairo, employees napped in their chairs one recent afternoon
while a handful of people lingered around King Tutankhamen’s gleaming
funerary mask, unhurried by any crowds.
Outside
the building, dozens of soldiers and police officers stood guard next
to armored vehicles and trucks, a visible reminder of the strife that
has isolated the country. Some may have been there to protect the
treasures and the tourists, but many were holding tear gas launchers,
ready to disperse crowds in case protesters dared to march on Tahrir
Square nearby.
Egypt
will hold a presidential election in three weeks, which is expected to
be won by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who led the military takeover of the
government in July and then served as defense minister and de facto
leader of the country. His supporters pin great hopes on his presidency,
saying that the popular military leader will bring a firm hand to
Egypt’s spiraling crises, including the drop-off in tourism. Mr. Sisi
has pointed to his background growing up in Cairo’s historic districts
as evidence that he understands the industry.
Some
of Egypt’s tour operators are skeptical, though, that the election will
bring any immediate relief. In the past, tourism rebounded quickly from
calamities, including deadly militant attacks on tourists, they say,
but this time there is a broader loss of confidence in Egypt from
overseas, a problem that clever slogans and confident leadership cannot
easily repair.
In
the garden outside the museum on a recent afternoon, desperate guides
chased after a group of tourists from Thailand, only to learn that the
Thais needed no guides because they had brought along Egyptian friends
to show them around. A shopkeeper in the museum lobby stood in his
stall, among maps and guidebooks no one was buying, recalling the boom
years, when “you couldn’t step a foot inside this museum.”
Alaa
Mosaad, a 37-year-old tour operator who sat in a nearly empty patio
restaurant, said he was afraid that the downturn in tourism “will last
another three or four years.” Like many in the industry, Mr. Mosaad has
taken up other work — in his case, teaching German — to pay the bills.
His
colleague Mohamed Atef, 30, noted that the succession of new
governments over the last few years had each promised greater stability.
But for all that, he said, “the situation of the country is getting
worse.”
source
Asmaa Al Zohairy contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com
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