Improving The Vacation Industry In Egypt

Introduction

Egypt was always known as the land of Pharaohs, nevertheless, Pharaonic civilization was just one part of Egypt’s whole history because Egypt has witnessed many cultures and a lot of civilizations like the Romans or the Greeks, and also the Christian and the Islamic expansions; Egypt has always been a center of the world interest.

We know history and study it from the monuments, because monuments are the real link between us nowadays and our ancestors in the past; Monuments show us their achievements, their civilization, and they tell us how they have lived.

Those monuments are our responsibility now, we must preserve them in order to show them to the next generations as they can learn from them just like the way we did; We must understand that those monuments are not durable or indestructible, because nowadays there are many monuments that are definitely suffering from negligence and carelessness because of low funding or the ignorance of their value. A lot of monuments are also threatened by the urban activities and their polluting effect.

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Egyptian monuments have been subjected to looting, plundering, and robbery from 2000 years up till now, especially in the 19th century when many monuments were severely damaged or even sometimes completely destroyed by the industrialization appeared, but that was not the only threat during that period because hundreds of explorers have come from Europe to Egypt in order to discover and know about the Egyptian history, but as they did many monuments were destroyed and more were stolen.

The Egyptian history are in our hands now, it is our responsibility and it also shall be the of the whole world as well, therefore there must be continuous maintenance and protection of those monuments, and as the illegal threats such as looting and robbery may increase, the legal strength has to increase.

In general, monuments are subjected to many threats that may lead to their destruction, those threats are:

• The weather and its effects (Acid rain).
• Urban pollution.
• Agricultural damage.
• Robbery and plundering.
• Overpopulation.
• Natural disasters (floods, and earthquakes).
• Lack of funds.
• The extraction of raw materials.
• Wars.

Some organizations are formed nowadays to save our history, they have just one mission preserve our history and protect it from all the threats by enhancing the awareness of the people of Egypt and abroad as well about the culture that Egypt has inherited in its history and its role in the civilization of the world, they also develop cultural programmes to conserve and protect that cultural heritage, on the other they assist in fighting looting and illicit trade of the antiquities. And at last they fund cultural researches and exchanges between our universities and foreign universities to gain more knowledge and experience that will definitely aid them to protect and improve the tourism in Egypt.

There is a very important thing that we must understand; Tourism has a huge effect on Egypt’s economy, and that would be easy to understand if you realized that only in the year 2000 foreign tourists numbers have reached about 6 million, with more than 4 million coming from Europe, the income that year from tourism only was 4.5 billion American Dollars. That means that we have to exert more efforts to improve the tourism in Egypt, because with better the tourism in Egypt, more tourists will come over which will in return increase the national income which will end in a better life.

To improve the tourism in Egypt we will have to ask ourselves some questions and their answers will absolutely be the solution:

• What do the tourists want?
• How to attract more tourists?
• Can we just rely on historical monuments?
• How can we enhance our tourism in the European Union market?

In that paper I will discuss the importance of our history, what have we lost? how can we just get it back?, and finally I will explain how important is tourism in our economy and how to improve modern tourism in order to attract more tourists and improve the economy of our beloved country Egypt.

Body

Development of tourism in Egypt:

Since 1982 the tourism industry has been developing significantly in Egypt , has the number of tourists in Egypt was 1,500,000 and it started to increase in a very rapid way, while on the 1990s that number was very high sometimes while other times was very low and that was because of 5 important reasons:

1. The peace process.

2. The aggressive policy of tourism promotion.

3. The low quality services.

4. Terrorism especially in July 1992 after killing a tourist and in November 1997 after the attacks on tourists in Luxor.

5. The Gulf war in 1991.

So if we took for example 2 sub periods (Table I) where the first period is from 1982 to 1993 and the 2nd one is from 2000 to 2007 we will find that the tourist arrivals number was 1,500,000 in 1982 and increased to 11,100,000 in 2007 which means that the tourist arrivals number is increasing with a rate of 9.2%; while the tourism capacity (Tourist villages and hotels) has increased from 27,300 rooms to 190,2000 through the period from 1985 till 2007; Another important finding is that the nights spent by tourists in Egypt have increased from 9,000,000 to 111,500,000 with a rate of growth of 12.1% annually, on the other hand income from tourism has raised from 315,000,000 American Dollars to about 9,500,000,000 American Dollars. Egypt today hosts about 25% of the whole tourism in the region of the Middle East.

The effect of tourism on the Egyptian economy

There is a very important thing that we must understand; Tourism has a huge effect on Egypt’s economy, and that would be easy to understand if you realized that only in the year 2000 foreign tourists numbers have reached about 6 million, with more than 4 million coming from Europe, the income that year from tourism only was 4.5 billion American Dollars, and that is the reason that we must enhance and develop the quality of our tourism industry.

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How to improve tourism in Egypt?

Retrieving our stolen history.

Ancient Egyptians used to bury valuable objects with their dead bodies, the thing that attracted many robbers and grave thieves. The tombs that were at higher risk and more subjected to robbery were definitely the royal and rich tombs, nevertheless, the poor tombs were also robbed because they also contained valuable stuff that were buried with the dead to be offered as a sacrifice. Tombs had many warnings on their walls but that didn’t stop or prevent the robbery; there were also times that robbing graves was done at the time of burial itself, and it is expected to be done by the undertakers or the tomb guards, in such cases tombs’ entrances are found intact but bodies are searched and valuables are gone.

The 21st family for example had their high ranked women mummified and they were discovered recently in Thebes tomb undisturbed, nevertheless, their golden faces were stolen and another jewelry were taken even before the completion of the wrapping process

In the Roman age grave robbery reached its maximum, a lot of Egyptian antiquities and valuable objects were transported from their home to Rome especially, and it would be obvious if you realized that there are fifteen obelisks in Rome nowadays. While in the middle age trading and trafficking of monuments and antiquities have flourished and the reason that Crusaders had thought that some Egyptian antiquities have curing effect from certain diseases; Also in the Renaissance the whole world was crazy about art, therefore, more interest in our monuments appeared; another thing to be mentioned is that Ottoman and before them Mamluke khedives didn’t realize the value of the Egyptian monuments.

Among the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries many valuable historical objects were shipped to Europe for diplomatic reasons. For example Khedia Abbas and also Said Pasha had given a lot of monuments to Archidum Maximium, a prince in Austria, as a gift and it is present now as the 1st collection in the Vienna museum; another incident when Mohammad Ali pasha has given an obelisk to king Philip of France and it is nowadays in Paris in the Place de la Concorde in exchange of the clock of the citadel.

Nowadays there are only few bodies that are still in their original tombs, and there are fewer that may be still in the real place they were inserted. In 1995 Egypt has succeeded to regain the artifacts monuments that were stolen during the Israeli occupation of Sinai by Israel itself, robbing ancient Egyptian monuments is a very old business whoever it became stronger with time till the moment, and there are still a lot of other monuments that were robbed by Israel and didn’t come back until now, in the 60s and the 70s hundreds of Egyptian antiquities were stolen by Israel but we have returned many of them to the EHCA (Egyptian Higher Council for Antiquities) from 2002 till 2005, however, Ibrahim El Nawawi, an Egyptian Archaeologist and a was committee member that prepared the monuments return, has stated that we have only returned a small piece of a huge treasure.

Now that we realized the importance of our history and how it was carelessly sold or stolen, we will need security and protection over our monuments and we need a new law. The general secretary of the SCA (Supreme Council of Antiquities) Mr.Zahi Hawass has stated that the law 117/1983 is not suitable anymore and it needs to be modified or changed because it doesn’t impose hard penalties on antiquities trafficking, and it needs to be harder in order to prevent any more trafficking.

The 1st antiquities law was issued in 1853 and it was changed 5 times till now with the most effective changes in 1912 and another one in 1983, some laws contained weakness points and they also didn’t prevent urban encroachment.

Improving the quality of tourism in Egypt

Improving the quality of any business is a very complex mission, because improving means changing, and changing is definitely stressful, you can’t just use magic to improve any business; you need stable systems and quality management in order to have a successful business, and those systems must be founded on strong bases of understanding the real objectives and aims of the business.

Tourism may be the most important business that has a great effect on the country’s economy, the number of visitors has risen from 1,500,000 visitors in 1982 to 6,000,000 in 2003 and it has risen in spite of the great political disturbances especially among the last few years, and in order to increase that number, the quality of service will definitely need to improve as well. For example, in order to compete, you will need to cater for the different needs of the clients; therefore the tourism product had become an industry that serves the needs of the clients, such as the niche market (Spa, health care, nature tourism, sport travel, culture tourism, religious travel and ship cruises) that are rapidly developing nowadays, so we will have to care more about improving the niche market because it is simply what the tourists need, in addition to that we must realize that tourists nowadays need the most value for money, the best quality, and the most flexible travelling experiences.

The WTO (World Tourism Organization) has stated 6 standards that has to be focused on by any tourism destination management when it’s improving any tourist service or product, those standards are:

Security and safety: the tourism product must not have any threats to life or even any dangerous effect on health, Security and safety standards are stated by law.

Accessibility: the communication, the services, and the products must be allowed to all the clients with no discrimination even with people that have disabilities.

Hygiene: the tourism product must be clean and safe.

Authenticity: it may be the hardest standard to be applied, it is to make the product distinct and unique from the other similar products in order to attract the customer’s attention and meet all of his expectations at the same time.

Harmony: it refers to the relation between the human and the natural environment and how to maintain quality of the products and the markets.

Transparency: it means providing the customer with all the true information that he may need about the product including its characteristics and its price.