NNA - Caretaker Minister of Tourism, Fadi Abboud, shed light Tuesday on a new-fangled strategy aimed to level up tourism through attracting the interests of South America, namely Brazil, Argentine, and Uruguay.
"Since more than 20 years, a tourism strategy was drawn based on our brothers in the Gulf instead of the immigrants, noting that tourists from the Gulf spend the most worldwide," he explained to a delegation of immigrants from Lebanese origins who visited him at his office today.
The delegation was headed by the President of the World Lebanese Cultural Union in Argentine, Nestor Hajj.
"As a businessman, I do know that there cannot be only one tourism source for Lebanon, since--for political reasons--the Gulf decided to boycott Lebanon. This is what reduced the tourism income by 35% comparing to 2010," Abboud indicated.
"We have put a new tourism strategy based on opening new tourism markets to South America. I believe that the country which has more than 15 million nationals abroad should not be suffering any tourism predicament," he said, deploring that former governments did not pay the required heed to the Lebanese Diaspora.
"But today, we do need them in order to improve our economy, especially our tourism," he stressed. "As a businessman, I consider Lebanon as the key of the region on the economic, investment, and trade levels."
The Minister also maintained that he would try to provide direct flights from Beirut to South America.
Negating allegations that there isn't any foreign tourist in Lebanon, Abboud noted that 891 thousand visitors had been to the country in the past eight months.
Moreover, he did not fail to underline that the security juncture was not as exacerbated as it appeared to be in media. "There are political pressures and a feeling that in the event of Gulf's boycott of Lebanon, Lebanese would starve to death."
"I would like to address a message; we are not people who [simply] die. No one would ever be able to estrange us," he said.
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