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Outbound
Egypt Tourism introduces special packages for India
Chetan Kapoor - Mumbai
The Egyptian Consulate Tourism Office is highly committed
to the Indian market as it has India-specific plans for the year 2008. Speaking
exclusively to Express TravelWorld, Samy Mahmoud, tourism counsellor,
Egyptian Consulate Tourism Office said, "In the new year we will start
the campaign Visit Egypt 2008 which would have various events with a special
agenda comprising various functions designed specially for Indians such as shopping,
sight seeing, water sports, etc." These events would be held across the
year with about three-four events per month.
According to Mahmoud, most Indians' knowledge of Egypt is restricted to trademark
monuments like the pyramids, Sphinx, etc and thus the Egyptian Consulate Tourism
Office have recently started to promote newer products in the Indian market.
"We have nice resorts, golf courses in different cities, besides Holy Family
packages especially for the Christian population since the Virgin Mary and Jesus
lived in Egypt for more than four years," he stated.
For Mahmoud, the Indian middle class population is the core focus as "it
is growing very fast right now and many are travelling abroad". This is
besides the corporate demand for incentives and conferences. He added, "During
2005, the Indians used to spend about a week holidaying, but now they are spending
nine-ten days. In 2005 when we started, we had 40,000 Indian tourists, which
rose to 65,000 in 2006. By the end of December 2007 there would have been around
75,000-80,000 Indian tourists in Egypt." He said that at present about
70 per cent of the Indian tourist population were groups and the rest were FITs.
With a tourism spend of close to half a million dollars, the tourism office
is not leaving any stone unturned and is focussing on both trade and consumer
media. Mahmoud avers, "We plan to start an ad campaign from next month
and work closely with trade and consumer media in our core markets of Mumbai
and Delhi." The tourism office has also worked out a special rate for 2008
for the Indian travel agents and tour operators if they book through Egypt Air,
its national carrier which flies thrice a week directly from Mumbai to Cairo.
Other airlines flying to Cairo include Kuwait Airways, Emirates, Gulf Air, Jordan
Airways and Qatar Airways.
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