The Tourism Ministry aims to attract 1 million German tourists to Egypt this year, according to an interview by the German magazine Touristik Aktuell with Tourism Minister, Khaled Rami. The target will be to reach 1.3 million tourists from Germany by the end of next year, Rami said. Rami said Egypt will install an electronic visa system allowing tourists to obtain a visa via online, although the implementation mechanism for this system regarding tourism programmes has not been determined. The minister said that in November 2015, the Ministry of Tourism will start reconsidering incentives given to charter flights, including Hurghada and Sharm El-Sheikh. Meanwhile, incentives given to Luxor, Taba, Marsa Alam and Marsa Matrouh will continue. Rami said his ministry is working on assuring quality for services offered in hotels and floating hotels, setting new criteria to categorise and rate these hotels according to applied international standards. During the upcoming years, Egypt aims to increase hotel-room capacity to reach 142,000 rooms to receive almost 20 million tourists by 2020, he added. Tourist flow in 2014 was estimated at 10 million tourists including almost 880,000 German tourists. Rami had earlier told Daily News Egypt that the ministry focuses on increasing tourist flow to reach 12 million tourists by the end of this year. Source: Daily News Egypt
