Egypt is a country with a deep ancient culture that should be massively monetized to boost the tourism industry of the country. Unfortunately, this has not been happening. Tourism growth in the country is quite sluggish and not as vibrant as should be. This worsened as from the year 2011 during the Arab uprising when the number of tourists visiting the country dropped from 14 million in 2010 to 7.5 million in 2017. From these figures, anyone would be right to conclude that the amounts of foreign exchange collected from the tourism sector must have greatly taken a sharp nosedive over the past one decade.
It would be prudent for the relevant tourism agencies to look into the exact causes of the poorly performing tourism sector. The misfortunes that befell the sector despite its huge potential could partly be linked to political uprising, terrorist attacks, a major airline disaster, mismanagement by past regimes and church bombings that scare away visitors. Attacks in the city of Atlanta and the busy seaport of Alexandria must have dealt a major blow to the tourism industry.
While researching on my topic, it was sad to learn that some of Egypt’s ancient sites and museums have been looted and artifacts stolen. I came across several stories about artifacts that had been looted and shipped to foreign countries and sold to artifact dealers. This places the valuable early Egyptian culture on its path to extinction. If something is not done to put looting to a stop and recover the stolen items, soon there will be little or nothing of value to attract anyone to the country. I would imagine that there are guys who visit the sites posing as tourists with an intention of stealing stuff too. In my opinion, the government needs to come up with appropriate policies on how to nab such people and charge them in courts of law for the offences. The Egyptian government should also work in conjunction with foreign governments to repatriate artifact dealers who buy items that have been looted from ancient Egyptian sites.