Egypt could receive around 7.5 mn tourists this year, an official at the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) told Enterprise yesterday. The number of German tourists visiting the country is likely to rise this year, helping offset the loss of Russian visitors, said Said El Batouty, who is also a member of the UN Economic Commission for Europe and a board member of the German Travel Association (DTV). “I expect a growth rate in the German market for Egypt of up to 30% as of fall 2022,” El Batouty said. “This will compensate for a good part of the lost Russian market.”

We don’t know what this means year-on-year: The government is yet to release annual tourism figures for 2021, though we know that around 3.5 mn tourists visited the country during 1H 2021. Some 13 mn tourists visited Egypt in 2019. The government is not expecting tourism activity in 2022 to exceed 2021 levels.

Germans made up the largest group of tourists to Egypt pre-covid, with 1.8 mn visiting the country in 2019, according to Germany’s Federal Foreign Office. That number dropped dramatically in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, with just 350k Germans traveling to Egypt last year.

The war in Ukraine is hurting the industry: Russia and Ukraine together accounted for 31% of our inbound tourism market before the war broke out in February.

Egypt has been reaching out to Germany and other European markets to fill the Russia and Ukraine-shaped holes in our tourism market: Officials have either lined up or begun talks with Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Poland and Estonia on ways to drive inbound tourism. Egypt has also widened the number of people eligible to obtain a visa on arrival or a pre-arrival electronic visa as it looks to support the tourism sector, and it launched a new tourism campaign (#FollowTheSun) targeting high-value markets in Europe and the US.