38 people were killed this June in Sousse, Tunisia, when a gunman opened fire on sun-bathers on the beach. It followed the killing of 25 people, at the Bardo museum in Tunis in March.
These attacks were clearly calculated to wreck the economy, and the effort may well succeed. Current estimates are that Tunisia will lose more than 2 million “tourist days” this year as a result.
And tourism in Tunisia is struggling.
Sousse is experiencing a significant drop in the number of tourists, similar to other places around the country, with tourism officials reporting a 70% drop in the number of European tourists.
Since the attack, businesses in Sousse have been closing at a high rate, and several employees have lost their jobs.
At least 23 hotels have been closed since the attack, and Tunisia’s tourism sector is expected to report a loss of income amounting to approximately $348 million, a huge blow to the country’s economy, which largely depends on tourism. About 400,000 people work in the tourism sector, and nearly 2 million citizens depend on the industry indirectly.
The government has taken major steps in a bid to increase security. Patrols have been increased to ensure that a similar incident does not occur again.
With the improved security, the government hopes that they can restore the faith of the international community. Officials are also lobbying the western governments to revoke their travel warnings.
All travel agencies in Scandinavia canceled trips to Tunisia. One of them is detur in Sweden.
“Due to the terrible incident in June we decided to cancel the rest of our summer program to Tunisia. In hindsight it was a good decision, as the Scandinavian countries foreign ministries issued the dissuasion for unnecessary travel to Tunisia shortly after,” says Orhan Ögütgen, Managing Director, detur, Sweden to TTO Scandinavia.
“Tunisia is still a beautiful and exotic destination, perfect for sun-thirsty Scandinavians. With its long history of charter travels, more than 35 years, the whole country is waiting for the return of the tourists. Our hopes and wishes is, that the tourism will bloom shortly again. On the business side, all the resorts are open and ready to greet new guests, “added Orhan Ögütgen.
“Our autumn and winter program is still open for booking, and our goal is to keep offering trips to Tunisia in 2016 as well. Our next flight to Tunisia is scheduled to depart on 2/10, and we are awaiting foreign ministry’s decision about the security situation. According to our local sources the situation in Tunisia is very calm and life continues as normal, only with fewer European tourists. As we don’t have the knowledge to determine any safety situation in a country, we leave that to the experts at the foreign ministry.
We will then consider how the future program will look like.
In 2014 we brought approximately 12.000 Swedish guests to Tunisia. Detur has since the start, 15 years ago, offered trips to Tunisia, and the hopes are we will continue to do so for several more years to come,” says Orhan Ögütgen.
caa
