Dispatch, Egypt: Why there’s hope for a turnaround
For the first time since the aftermath of the 2011 revolution, Travel Weekly is sending a reporter to Egypt to help gauge if the country is ready to reignite tourism. Senior editor Michelle Baran, who has been to Egypt three times for Travel Weekly, most recently in March 2011, will be traveling throughout the country with Abercrombie & Kent. Her first dispatch follows.
The last time I was in Egypt was in March 2011, less than two months after the Jan. 25 revolution that saw the resignation of former president Hosni Mubarak.
I toured the country and reported on the relative calm after the initial revolutionary storm and on the drastic halt in tourism Egypt had experienced in light of the uprising. But few could predict back then just how bad the situation was going to get in the coming months and years before it would start to get better.
What many in Egypt and in the tourism industry had hoped would be a relatively short-lived transition turned into a three-year political and economic crisis that resulted in a prolonged near-shutdown of Egypt’s tourism sector.
