Magued Fawzy, head of the Chamber of Hotel Establishments, said that a representative of the World Tourism Organization will arrive in Egypt at the end of this week to begin a tour of Egyptian hotels as part of testing the application of the new hotel classification standards.
Fawzy added in exclusive statements that testing of the standards has been completed at 10 hotels in Cairo of various star ratings, as well as a number of hotels in Sharm El Sheikh, noting that testing is scheduled to begin at 10 hotels in Hurghada, which have not yet been selected, before moving on to Luxor to test the standards on floating and fixed hotels.
The head of the Chamber of Hotels said the new standards, once tested, are scheduled to be presented to Minister of Tourism Dr. Rania Al-Mashat for approval, expecting them to come into force before the end of next July.
It is worth noting that the Ministry of Tourism and the Chamber of Hotel Establishments, in cooperation with the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), had updated the hotel standards, but those standards were not finalised at the time due to the circumstances Egypt went through, and the project was halted.
With the return of Egyptian tourism and the desire of the various parties to develop tourism services and give the appropriate push to tourism promotion, the Ministry of Tourism, in coordination with the Chamber of Hotel Establishments, contacted the UNWTO, after which one of the organisation's experts who had previously worked on this project visited Egypt from 5 to 13 last August, inspecting a number of hotels in Cairo, Hurghada and Aswan, as well as the floating hotels docked in Cairo at the time.
The expert reviewed and amended the previous specifications and introduced some new items to keep pace with the international standards applied in hotels worldwide, including items on food safety and health safety.
