Tunisia After the Uprising " Is it safe to go?"

Tunisians hope for tourism revival after revolution

HAMMAMET, Tunisia: Inside the walls of the medina market, a top draw in Tunisia’s Hammamet seaside resort, Hafedh Alouini arranges his shop in hopes of a customer.

“I haven’t made a sale in nearly three weeks,” he says, as a handful of other souk sellers lean against the stone walls of the medina, smoking cigarettes and soaking up sun. “There are no tourists. We’re just waiting.”

Tunisia’s tourism industry, the North African country’s top foreign currency earner, has ground to a halt since a popular uprising last month forced President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali to flee and inspired further revolts through the Arab world.

Thousands of tourists were evacuated as protests reached a head, gutting the tourism sector by 40 percent in January and leading the government to launch an advertising campaign to draw people back, dubbed, “I love Tunisia, the place to be … now!”

The drop-off is no small problem for Tunisia. Tourism employs roughly 400,000 of the country’s 10 million people, and brought in nearly $2.5 billion in receipts last year – more than 6 percent of its gross national product.

Now, as Tunisia struggles to find its footing – with sporadic demonstrations choking the capital and the interim government wrestling with a surge in crime – the question Tunisians are asking is, “Will they return?”

The government is hopeful, and says charter flights from Europe started to resume over the weekend to the scenic town of Bizerte, just across the Mediterranean from Sicily and Sardinia.

Earlier this month, Tourism Minister Mehdi Houass said the popular overthrow of Ben Ali was “a good promotion” that could turn out being good for the sector. “The revolution has made our country known to the whole world,” he said. “We want to tell all our friends that they can come to Tunisia in a atmosphere of peace [and] freedom.”

But ongoing demonstrations and worries about rising religious tension could be a setback, as could violence unfolding elsewhere in the Arab world, including in neighboring Libya where hundreds have been killed.

“Security is everything,” said Kate Davis, director of the Saphir Palace hotel in Hammamet.

“For people who are not here to see that it is calm and beautiful, the news about what is going on in the region may be discouraging,” she said. “But I’m very optimistic that tourism will return in the coming months.”

In an analysts’ call on North Africa in late January, Fitch Ratings cut its 2011 growth forecast for Tunisia to 2 percent from 5 percent, saying tourism would be the sector hardest hit by the political unrest.

But it added that the economy could rebound next year if elections to replace Ben Ali pass smoothly.

For Alouini that sounds good. “For now, we’re putting food on the table in whatever way we can,” he said. “We have won our freedom – there is no price you can put on that.”



Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Business/Middle-East/Feb/22/Tunisians-hope-for-tourism-revival-after-revolution.ashx#ixzz1TUKFQMjA
(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb)