Samy Mahmoud, Chairman of the Egyptian Tourism Authority
A major tradeshow like the International Tourism Fair in Madrid (FITUR) always provides ample opportunities to talk with boldface names in the travel industry on a variety of issues. A good case in point this time around was Mr. Samy Mahmoud, chairman of the Egyptian Tourism Authority, who sat down with Caribbean News Digital. In this exclusive interview, Mr. Mahmoud spoke about his country’s perspectives toward Latin America and the Caribbean, the Chinese outbound market and estimates for the ongoing year.
The Tourism Authority used to promote relations and tourism with every country in the world. How are you doing with Latin America and the Caribbean?
Yes. We have many tours to promote Egypt in different countries. First, we give incentives for charter flights; second, we do the advertisement campaign with travel agents and tour operators, we organize fam-trips for media and travel agencies. We attend the most important travel fairs and, also, we held workshop and seminar on Egypt.
Do you have any incoming tourism from Latin America?
Yes, of course. Latin American is a very potential market for Egypt, especially from Brazil and Argentina. Last year, we received almost 25 thousand visitors from Brazil and 15 thousand from Argentina.
And you are also developing the Chinese market.
Yes. The Chinese market is also very important for Egypt. By the end of 2010, we had more than 1 hundred thousand tourists from China, but by the end of 2014, we had almost 65 thousand.
In spite of what you see sometimes on the press, you assure that people can feel safe in Egypt.
Yes. They feel safe because our government takes care of every tourist coming to Egypt, for security reasons we have security cameras everywhere, we have a very strong security system and there are police officers throughout the tourist area.
What’s the estimate for this year, 2015?
Yes. We expect 11 to 12 million tourists.
That would be a record.
No. We had a higher record by 2010 with 15 million tourists.
