Africa In Focus: Algeria Plans Better Hotels to Lure Foreign Tourists

Increasing hotel capacity and improving their facilities are key to an Algerian plan to boost tourism announced this week. Algeria's tourism minister, Cherif Rahmani, is urging local leaders to take a more professional approach to the hospitality industry and to start building new facilities under a plan to attract more foreign visitors.

• Rahmani announced the plan to revitalise Algeria’s under-performing tourism sector on Wednesday (January 20th) while meeting in Algiers with wilaya heads, tourism directors and local investors.

• “We have to prioritise projects and quality instead of dwelling on bogus studies,” the minister said as he announced the initiative, the fifth annual plan of its type.
• The new plan includes 80 projects targeting all of the country’s wilayas. One key focus is increasing the number of available hotel beds nationwide by 6,470. Rahmani announced he would re-open 140 hotels and facilitate the construction of more 2- and 3-star facilities.
• The campaign to increase the number of beds will continue until 2014, when the minister hopes to reach a goal of 75,000.
• Fifty-five of the projects will be distributed throughout the country’s regions: 18 in the north-east; 17 in the north-central region; 13 in the north-west; and 7 in the south.
• This year’s tourism initiative is much more restrained than the one unveiled in 2009, which saw the implementation of over 300 projects with the aim of creating 58,200 jobs.
• One highlight of last year’s measures was a high-profile advertising campaign featuring football legend Zinedine Zidane. The two-minute advert was shown on all Algerian television channels for three months, and on several European channels, including France24, CNN and EuroNews.
• This latest plan comes after a slight increase in Algerian tourism revenues. Though 2008 saw a slight 1.64% jump in visitor numbers compared with 2007, Algeria has still not been able to regain the popularity it had with travellers in 1990. The minister hopes to attract even more foreign visitors to Algeria this year.
• “Tourism in Algeria … is down from 1990 when the flow of tourism provided close to 8% of revenue”, Dr. Saâdane Chebaîki, a member of the national association of Algerian economists, said in December at a Tamanrasset meeting focused on developing tourism.
• Algeria earned $300 million from foreign visitors in 2008, an increase of 37% over its 2007 tourism revenues, said Professor Nacer Mourad, who emphasised the importance of tourism in making inroads against poverty. “An improvement in the security situation over the past five years has helped tourism to return,” Karim, who runs a travel agency, told Magharebia on January 11th. But he said the reports of terrorists in the Sahel regions have hurt Algeria’s reputation.
• But travel agent Amine Dali rejected this explanation.
• “The security situation…between 1992 and 2005 explains why tourism in Algeria has been in decline”, he told Magharebia on January 11th in Algiers. “But with the return of security, there is no justification now for a freeze in tourist activity.”
• Aymen, who works in an Algiers travel agency, said that Algeria’s natural potential makes it one of the finest tourist destinations in the world. But he told Magharebia that the “lack of basic infrastructure [and] training for specialist managers, and above all, the lack of tourist marketing” were the main reasons for the tourism slump.