Unable to ignore the swelling number of incoming Indian travellers, the tourism ministry of the Arab Republic of Egypt is looking to promote the land's untapped tourism potential that it had so far not done.

Terming India as "the market of the future", its minister of tourism, Zoheir Garranah, said that while it will continue to focus on the country's cultural aspect to attract Indian travellers, it will bring other aspects to the fore. "We want to highlight other types of tourism that Egypt can offer like MICE, along with golf tourism, honeymoon packages, beach tourism, yachting, shopping tourism and Bollywood," he said. In fact, the TAAI committee had considered Egypt as the venue for its conference this year. While beach tourism along the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea has been popular with international tourists, especially Germans, Egypt Tourism Authority (ETA) will now promote Hurghada and Sharm el-Sheikh in India as well.

Garranah added that ETA will add India to its section dedicated to the travel trade on its official website. However, the addition had not been made till the time of going to the press. The part-funding programme for tour operators to promote Egypt, a pilot project started last year by ETA, is also being continued this year and the minister quoted a sum of US$ 2,00,000 as earmarked for the same this year.

When asked about the potential of residential tourism in attracting foreign investment, particularly from India, Garranah said that although real estate and residential tourism are one of the strongest bases for developing tourism, "the developers know where the money is". He added, "We have offices in England that work on selling homes in Egypt." In any case, there are strict laws regarding this because of the history of the region. To facilitate the increase in Indian arrivals, EgyptAir has increased the frequency of its Mumbai-Cairo flight from twice to thrice a week, besides starting flights on the Mumbai-KL route with thrice-a-week frequency. According to Ahmed Wafsy, the airline's regional manager (India), it will also look at operations from Delhi, Bangalore and Ahmedabad for its Cairo and KL flights soon. Garranah added that ETA had already recorded an average growth of 15 per cent this year from 51,000 in 2005 to 61,000 in 2006.