Abdelouahab Nouri: “Algeria's Tourism Sector Is Catastrophic”

Tourism and Handicraft Minister, Abdelouahab Nouri, drew a black picture of the reality of tourism and hospitality in Algeria, saying that he is conducting a catastrophic sector, without achievements, like its predecessors, and went even further, adding that Algeria and given all the tourist structures that it has, remains unable to receive 100.000 tourists a year, asking; “Where do foreign tourists reside when they will visit Algeria? We have a lot of work to do in the coming days”, in reference to the current period which is allocated for re-evaluating the sector.

He explained, on Monday, during his supervision on the opening of the National Forum for the Creation of the Region, Tourism and Handicrafts, at the army Hotel in Beni Messouss, that the laws which are organization the sector did not change since 1989, similar to obliging travel agencies every three months to renew their accreditation, which was considered one of the impediments to the development of the sector, wondering about the reason of dumping over 1800 travel agencies in administrative procedures, instead of paying attention to their main role, which lies in the development of the sector.

“I’m not here to judge the officials, but everything has to be changed in the coming period”.

“There are bad hotels’ managers, and we should reclassify them, according to the stars and the level of service soon. Accommodation and reception circumstances in these structures remain disastrous, calling the tourism managers to conduct control and inspection tours”.

“I’m sorry about the tourism situation in Algeria, and I do not have a magic wand to turn things upside down, but I promise to work hard to improve the situation and eliminate the chaos. Over 1548 tourism projects are approved by our ministerial services with a financial value that is equivalent to 664 billion DZD, of which 511 projects are under achievement, which will provide 72.000 beds of the total 195.000 beds”.

“Statistics on areas of tourism expansion, which were already announced by former officials in the Ministry of Tourism about 205 areas of expansion are false, because most of them were taken by another sector and were devised to build houses, which drives us today to to conduct a re-inventory of these areas. We should train officials to go out of the dependency and re-evaluate the performance of the sector”.

With regard to the obstacles for granting Algerian visas for foreigners who are wishing to enter the national territory, he said; “Government has the right to reduce the visas depending on the circumstances, and Algeria was living a stage of terrorism, what makes it today go easy in the granting of visas, for fear of any excesses”, and he even went so far saying; “Even France, after Nice attack, did not grant visas easily, and this is a legitimate right to maintain the security of any country”.