Representatives of 140 German travel and tourism companies pose for an image as the Giza pyramids in background on Tuesday 30 November, 2022. Photo courtesy of Egyptian cabinet.
The tour aims to promote Egyptian tourism in Germany, one of the largest markets of tourism to Egypt.
It is expected to help increase Air Cairo’s flights to Germany in the upcoming summer season to 82 flights weekly, up from 62 last summer, the Ministry of Civil Aviation said in a statement on Wednesday.
The Air Cairo flights will link airports in Hurghada and Marsa Alam on the Red Sea and Sharm El-Sheikh in South Sinai with 13 German cities, the ministry noted.
The ministry said that the tour was organised in cooperation with one of the largest tour operator companies in Germany.
During the tour, the German delegation visited the Giza Pyramids and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
A second introductory tour for another 65 German travel and tourism companies will be organised during the first half of December, the statement cited Chairman of Air Cairo Hussein Sherif as saying.
This tour is expected to help link tourist attractions in Egypt with German cities through a network of domestic flights that connect together airports in Cairo, Hurghada, Marsa Alam, Sharm El-Sheikh, Luxor, and Giza, Sherif noted.
Air Cairo currently operates 30 flights per week to nine German cities as well as to the Austrian capital Vienna, and to Zurich and Basel in Switzerland.
More German visitors as Egypt promotes tourism
In the first half of 2022, more than 600,000 German tourists visited Egypt, making Germans the largest group of foreign tourists to visit Egypt during that period, according to the German Federal Foreign Office.
The number of German visitors to Egypt had dropped from 1.8 million in 2019 to a few hundred thousand in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Egypt has recently witnessed an increase in the number of German visitors. The recent increase coincides with Egypt’s efforts to resuscitate the tourism sector, a main source of national income, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
Egypt plans to stimulate inbound tourism and increase foreign tourist arrivals from 25 to 30 percent annually, Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Ahmed Issa had said in September.
According to data by Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS) 4.9 million tourists visited Egypt in the first half of 2022 (from January to June), marking an 85.4 percent increase compared to the first half of 2021, when 2.6 million tourists visited the country.
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