Algeria wants to attract more visitors to the cultural and scenic treasures of Africa’s largest country, abandoning its status as a lost tourism country and developing a sector overshadowed by rivals from neighboring Morocco and Tunisia.
This giant North African country offers Roman and Islamic sites, beaches and mountains just an hour’s flight from Europe, as well as mesmerizing Saharan landscapes, where visitors can sleep on the dunes under the stars and ride a camel with the Tuareg nomads.
But while Morocco, a tourist country, welcomed 14.5 million visitors in 2023, Algeria, larger and richer, welcomed only 3.3 million foreign tourists, according to the Ministry of Tourism.
Around 1.2 million of these vacationers were Algerians in the diaspora visiting families.
The lack of travelers testifies to Algeria’s neglect of a sector which remains one of the little-known jewels of world tourism.
As Algeria’s oil and gas revenues increased in the 1960s and 1970s, successive governments lost interest in developing mass tourism. The plunge into political conflict in the 1990s pushed the country even further off the beaten track.
But even though security has now improved significantly, Algeria must tackle a rigid visa system and poor transport links, as well as grant privileges to local and foreign private investors to allow tourism to flourish. prosper, analysts say.
Saliha Nacerbay, director general of the National Tourism Board, outlined plans to attract 12 million tourists by 2030, an ambitious four-fold increase.
“To achieve this, we as a tourism sector and traditional industry seek to encourage investments, provide facilities for investors, build tourism and hotel facilities,” she said, s speaking at the International Tourism and Travel Fair, organized in Algiers in May. June 30 to 2.
Algeria plans to build hotels and restructure and modernize existing ones. The Tourism Ministry said around 2,000 tourism projects have been approved so far, of which 800 are currently under construction.
The country is also restoring its historic sites, with 249 sites earmarked for tourism development. About 70 sites have been prepared and restoration plans are underway for an additional 50 sites, officials said.
French tourist Patrick Lebeau stressed the need to improve infrastructure to fully realize Algeria’s tourism prospects.
“Obviously there is a lot of tourism potential, but there is still a lot of work to do to attract us,” Lebeau said.
Tourism and travel created 543,500 jobs in Algeria in 2021, according to the Statista website. On the other hand, tourism professionals in Morocco estimate that the sector provides 700,000 direct jobs in the kingdom, and many more indirect jobs.
