Arab unrest takes $7bn toll as tourists flee to Europe

Shaun Mattingley began arranging a tailor-made family holiday to Cairo, Luxor and Aswan five months before their Feb 19 departure, eager to show his wife and daughter “the Egypt I had grown to love over the years.”

They never made it. With Hosni Mubarak’s regime in its dying days, he cancelled the trip two weeks before they were to fly to Cairo and instead took his family to Spain. Unrest has cost the Arab world billions of dollars in revenue and chipped away at the earnings of resorts, hotels and tour companies, such as Hannover, Germany-based TUI and Egyptian Resorts.

While the wave of popular upheavals sweeping the Arab world holds the promise of ushering in greater prosperity and democracy for millions of people, the unrest has undermined one of the region’s biggest industries, leaving many economically worse off now than they were before the protests began.

“We’ll do the trip when the elections are out of the way and there is stability,” said Mattingley, 46, director of Delta Community, an electronic trading platform in Eysins, Switzerland, about 26km north of Geneva.

The Arab Spring has taken a toll on tourism in cash-strapped nations from Jordan and Egypt to Morocco and Tunisia, costing the region more than $7bn, according to the Arab Tourism Organization in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The number of visitors to North Africa and the Middle East dropped 13 percent and 11 percent, respectively, in the first half of 2011, said Taleb Rifai, secretary general of the United Nations World Tourism Organization in Madrid.

Tourism is the world’s third-largest industry, contributing $1.2 trillion - or 5.2 percent of the global economy - every year. The industry is responsible for one in every 12 jobs, Rifai said.

Of the 61 million visitors to the Middle East last year, more than 14 million went to Egypt, whose pyramids, temples, Nile cruises and mummies make it the top tourist destination in the Arab world and No. 18 globally, according to the UN agency.

Egypt, which counts on foreign visitors for 16 percent of its gross domestic product and 14 percent of jobs, lost 80 percent of revenue in the last holiday season, Tourism Minister Mounir Fakhry Abdel Nour told Jordan’s Ad Dustour newspaper on Oct 1. The government expects tourism revenue to fall to $10bn this year, from $12.5bn in 2010.

Travel agencies as well as resorts and hotels in the Middle East are also feeling the pinch. Egyptian Resorts, a Red Sea resorts developer, said first-half net income plunged 80 percent, while Orascom Hotels & Development, the Cairo-based unit of Switzerland’s Orascom Development Holding, had a first-quarter loss of 6.1 million Egyptian pounds ($1m) compared with a profit of 164.2 million pounds a year earlier.

Tour operators in Germany, home to the world’s biggest spenders on international holidays, said summer bookings to the Middle East and North Africa collapsed by as much as 50 percent.

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