Sharm El-Sheikh International Airport received the first direct flight from the Swedish capital Stockholm, carrying 177 passengers at full aircraft capacity, after direct flights from Sweden to Sharm El-Sheikh had been suspended for 8 years and 8 months.
For her part, Dr. Rania Al-Mashat, Minister of Tourism, said the arrival of this flight heralds the return of Swedish tourism and reflects Swedish tourists' desire to spend their holidays in Sharm El-Sheikh.
Al-Mashat stressed the importance for Egypt of Scandinavian tourism, which includes Sweden, Norway and Denmark, noting that tourist traffic from the Scandinavian countries has begun to recover, especially from Sweden.
Al-Mashat noted that the new aviation stimulus program has contributed significantly to increasing inbound tourism to Egypt from many markets, through operating air routes and boosting traffic at regional airports and various tourist areas, and a number of Scandinavian countries benefit from it.
She explained that the new stimulus program grants additional incentives that increase every 6 months on the incentivized flights, adding that the ministry has settled all outstanding dues related to the previous aviation stimulus program, which had been a problem in past years, restoring credibility between tour operators and the Egyptian government.
She added that the resumption of airline routes from many countries to Egypt reflects the great success achieved by Egypt's promotional campaign, in which the ministry relied on updating promotion mechanisms. This was highlighted by the World Economic Forum's Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report 2019, issued last September, in which Egypt advanced from 60th to 5th place in tourism promotion and marketing strategy, and Egypt also achieved the fourth-highest growth in performance globally in the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index according to this report. Egypt also came top in Africa in the report published in September 2019 by Bloom Consulting, which specializes in analyzing, evaluating and ranking the performance of countries' tourism promotion (country branding), with Egypt ranking first for the first time since 2013.
She stressed that the ministry always seeks to diversify the source markets for tourism and open new tourism markets, in addition to attracting more inbound tourism from traditional source markets, which is the aim of the promotion and marketing pillar of the Structural Reform Program for the Development of the Tourism Sector.
It is worth noting that Swedish tourism recorded the arrival of about 71,000 tourists in 2018, up 47% compared with 2017, who spent 724,000 tourist nights, an increase of 60%.
