“LAST year was especially difficult,” says Sabri Belhaouane. The Russian-Tunisian tour guide is still reeling from two terrorist attacks in 2015. In March that year three gunmen murdered 22 people at a museum in Tunis; in June a lone shooter killed 38 people at a beach resort in Sousse. Most of the victims were tourists. A million people cancelled plans to visit Tunisia. Some 70 hotels closed and tourism revenues, which were 7% of GDP, dropped by almost half.
Tunisia’s fledgling tourism industry seemed doomed. But then, the Russians showed up. By last month, just under 600,000 Russian tourists had visited Tunisia this year, mostly young families and retirees from outside Moscow and St Petersburg. That is a tenfold increase on last year. Historically, Tunisia has looked westward for its non-Arab tourists; first came the French, bolstered by a linguistic and cultural familiarity, then Brits, Spaniards, Italians, and Germans. But Western European travel warnings and cancellations by big tour operators have forced Tunisia to shift its orientation.
Tunisian tourism has been boosted by the Kremlin’s decisions restricting travel...Continue reading
from Middle East and Africa http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21709970-relief-unexpected-source-russians-are-coming?fsrc=rss
via https://ifttt.com/ IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment