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Roundup: Moroccan tourism down amid rise of terrorism threat

Xinhua, August 24, 2016 Adjust font size:

After more than a decade of steady growth, tourism in Morocco is experiencing a significant drop amid the rise of terrorist threat worldwide.

While the country's tourism industry got a wake-up call in 2015 following a series of terrorist attacks in the region, the latest data on arrivals and bookings in the first half of 2016 show a clearer dip with the hike in number of terror attacks in different parts of the world, especially Europe.

According to statistics released on Monday by the country's tourism officials, only 4.2 million people arrived in Morocco in the first half of 2016, registering a 2.6 percent drop compared to the same period last year.

The number of French tourists, Morocco's largest source of tourism, dipped by seven percent in the first six months of 2016. The North African nation also saw declines in visitors from the United Kingdom by eight percent, Italy and Germany by five percent respectively.

Morocco's top destinations Marrakesh and Agadir, which registered 59 percent of the national total for overnight bookings, witnessed a decline of tourist arrival by five percent and three percent compared with a year earlier.

While the number of tourists dropped, tourism revenues surprisingly rose by 3.4 percent compared to the same period last year, generating some 2.7 billion U.S. dollars.

However, what is clear is that the drop in tourist arrival was parallel with the resurgence of violence in the region since the emergence of the Islamic State (IS) group in 2014 and terror attacks worldwide.

The number of tourists to Morocco was up seven percent in 2013, two percent in 2014, but down by one percent in 2015. This very fact has been evoked as early as late 2015 by Moroccan officials.

"Since mid-2014 with the emergence of the IS, we have seen the dwindling of the number of tourists," Lahcen Haddad, the tourism minister, said before the November 2015 assault on Paris.

Questioned by Moroccan MPs earlier this month, the Moroccan minister clearly linked the decline of tourist flow and bookings since 2015 to the terror attacks in France, Tunisia and Turkey.

With Europeans stay away, Morocco is pinning its hopes to expand the tourism sector on visitors from Russia, West Africa and China.

The Moroccan tourism minister said the nation hopes to increase the number of Russian tourists from 40,000 in 2015 to 200,000 by 2019.

Tourism is one of the main economic drivers in Morocco as it employs over 500,000 people, nearly five percent of the country's total jobs, and makes up 6.7 percent of Morocco's GDP. Endit