Morocco’s tourism industry continued recovering from Covid-19 crisis despite the quake that hit the Kingdom a few weeks ago and the slew of visit cancellations that followed, said Financial Times on Thursday, quoting Moroccan officials and professionals.
Experts believe the overall impact on the country’s hospitality and tourism industry, which accounts for 7% of the GDP and employs 5% of the workforce, will be limited.
Tourism Minister Fatim-Zahra Ammor stated that “Cancellations have remained lower than our expectations,” showing some optimism about the year-end projections.
Prior to the earthquake, Morocco was set to achieve a record of 14 million visitors by end of Dec. 2023. According to the official, 8.6 million tourists visited the country in the first seven months of 2023, up 15% over the same period in 2019 (pre-Covid), generating revenues of $5.6 billion (up 38%).
The IMF and WB Annual meetings, which were maintained in Morocco after the earthquake, would put Morocco in the global spotlight, boosting tourist arrivals and earnings, said the minister.
For James Wix, director of the Le Farnatchi Hotel, tourism in Marrakech has “taken a bit of a hit.” Aziz Begdouri, owner of the La Maison Blanche hotel in Tangier, said he has received a few cancellations “from people who did not look at a map” to see how distant Tangier was from the High Atlas mountain range.
The tourism minister said that the sector has obtained about 600 Mln dollars in government funding for a plan aimed at boosting visitor arrivals to 17.5 million by the end of 2026, generating an additional 200,000 jobs, and increasing yearly revenue in the tourist sector to 12 bln dollars.
Ammor affirmed that reorganizing the country’s tourist services to include a broader range of so-called “experience” packages, as city breaks, beach vacations, watersports, mountain trekking, and gastronomy can make a big difference.