New State Department travel alert is bad news for Egypt
By Max Fisher, Published: February 6, 2013 at 4:05 pm

Wednesday brought another troubling development for the Egyptian economy, which relies heavily on tourism and has suffered mightily since protests broke out in January 2011:

The U.S. State Department has issued a scary-sounding travel alert that it says applies through May. The alert cites ongoing violence, political unrest that could trigger yet more clashes and the proximity of demonstrations to the U.S. embassy compound in Cairo, which protesters attacked head-on in September.

Though such travel alerts are common, it’s a reminder that the State Department is not exactly encouraging Americans to visit Egypt in droves, not that they have been since 2011 anyway.

The relevant information from the travel alert is below. I visited Egypt in August 2011 and found the hotels and museums all but empty. August is always slow in Egypt – it’s hot, and that year it was the holy month of Ramadan – but everyone I spoke to emphasized that it had been a painful year for the all-important tourism industry.

Since then, things have only worsened, with hotel occupancy rates hitting all-time lows. In late January, a band of thugs attacked the popular Semiramis Intercontinental hotel two nights in a row.

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