Egypt will receive its first tourist flights straight from Europe to the northwest coast next month, opening up Mediterranean beaches where few foreigners now venture, Tourism Minister Ahmed el-Maghraby said on Monday.
Egypt has about 450 km (280 miles) of coastline between the city of Alexandria and the Libyan border to the west. Developers have built up many stretches for domestic summer tourism but parts of it remain untouched.
Maghraby told Reuters in an interview that the area would make its real debut on the international scene this summer when Europe's biggest tourism firm TUI opens a hotel on the coast 20 km (12 miles) east of the town of Marsa Matrouh.
"We signed our first project there several months ago with the TUI group, which has contracted to build five hotels with a total of 2,500 rooms. The first hotel is under construction now and hopefully will be open at the end of this summer," he said.
"The first flights will be coming before the beginning of this season, so the beginning of the tourist flow ... will be hopefully at the end of March," he added.
Egypt has built two airports along the coast, at Marsa Matrouh and El Alamein, near the World War Two battlefield of the same name, to prepare for the development of the region.
Previous governments have tended to treat the coast as an extension of Alexandria, where Egyptians who can afford it often spend weeks during the summer to escape the heat of Cairo.
But Maghraby, a businessmen brought into a cabinet of economic reformers last July, believes it could be a major attraction for people from western Europe, for whom it is more than one hour's flying time closer than Egypt's Red Sea resorts. He said the area offered spectacular opportunities for desert safaris, diving excursions to sunken ships and trips to historic Alexandria, just a few hours away by road.
SEVEN PERCENT GROWTH FOR 10 YEARS
Although parts of the coast look cluttered with urban sprawl, Maghraby said there was plenty of land spare. "I don't think for generations to come we will be able to even come close to making a major impact on the space," he said.
Tourism is a major industry in Egypt. Last year, a record 8.1 million visitors earned the country $6.6 billion in hard currency, 43 percent more than in 2003.
Maghraby said his long-term plan was to double the annual number of visitors to 16 million by the mid-2010s. That would mean building some 12,000 to 14,000 new hotel rooms a year, at an annual cost of about $1 billion. Investors are already committed to that level for the next two years, he said.
Maghraby said he was not worried by a 7 percent gain in the Egyptian pound against the dollar since December, despite the boost to tourism from a competitive exchange rate in the last two years. The currency fell to an historic low of 6.23 to the dollar late last year, and also trades at lows against the euro.
"A major increase in the value of the Egyptian pound could have a negative effect. However, we are very far from a substantial movement in its value at this stage," he added.
Maghraby said the government aimed to make ownership of holiday homes in Egypt more attractive to overseas buyers, by abolishing a rule that prevents foreigners who buy property from from selling it for five years.
"The new direction is to equate fully between Egyptians and non-Egyptians in ownership of residential real estate," he said.
