Tourists Filling the Flights Out of Egypt

The Menatours travel agency was awash with customers Sunday, but for all the wrong reasons.

Rather than planning leisure outings or excursions to other parts of Egypt, the agency’s harried staff worked diligently all weekend to help tourists united in a single goal: to get out of the country as fast as possible.

No charter flights were available today, manager Samia el Badan patiently told an anxious client. Then she joked grimly: “You’ll have to stay with us till next week.”

Beyond the immediate chaos and carnage, the bombers who struck this popular resort town Saturday appeared to be aiming squarely at the lifeblood of the Egyptian economy, its mammoth tourism industry. Sharm el Sheik, on the edge of the Red Sea under a scorching desert sun, is one of the crown jewels of the country’s campaign to lure vacationing foreigners and its own jet-setters.

But the rush for the exits in the wake of Saturday’s deadly attacks demonstrated how attractive a target tourism has become for terrorists bent on disrupting economic activity, discrediting governments, and disheartening residents and visitors alike.

“The blokes out here are lovely people, and if you think about them, you feel bad because their livelihoods are going to suffer,” said Dave Owen, 28, a British tourist who signed up for the first flight back to London on Saturday night, halfway into a two-week stay. He had been a guest at the Ghazala Gardens Hotel, the scene of the most devastating of the three bombings early Saturday.

“I wouldn’t say, ‘Don’t come to Egypt,’ ” Owen said, “but after what’s happened, I’d be wary.”

The attacks here echoed the 2002 nightclub bombings on Bali that killed more than 200 people on the Indonesian resort island, and a recent rash of violence at tourist spots throughout Egypt, all allegedly instigated by radical Islamic groups. Two such groups have made competing, and unverified, claims of responsibility for Saturday’s explosions.

Police have rounded up more than 70 people for questioning in connection with the attacks. Ashraf Ayoub, a political activist in Arish, a Bedouin area north of here, said 53 people were detained from his community alone. Human rights activists say that Egyptian authorities often single out Bedouins after such incidents.

The effect of such attacks on a local economy can be drastic and almost instantaneous, and Egypt’s tourism minister predicted that the industry would probably suffer. Since tourist hot spots are, by nature, magnets for relaxed and unsuspecting crowds, they are increasingly popular targets for bloody assaults, analysts say.

“We saw this after the Bali attack, saying, ‘Oh yes, it was deliberately designed to kill the tourism industry.’ It did that, but it was also an easy target for getting a whole lot of foreigners in one place,” said Athol Yates, a terrorism expert in Canberra, the Australian capital.

“When you look at foreign interests overseas, it’s either in the financial area or in tourism. It’s really not in many other things,” Yates said. “Tourism targets will increase -- I believe that.”

In London, where discouraging tourism did not appear to be the prime aim of this month’s series of blasts on subway and bus lines, the travel industry forecast a 2% drop -- or more than half a billion dollars -- in revenue from overseas guests this year because of the attacks.

Egypt’s $6.6-billion-a-year tourism sector is much smaller than Britain’s. But even a slight downturn is felt because the industry plays a much larger role in the country’s overall economy. By one estimate, tourism is Egypt’s biggest private employer. Last year, 8 million people visited, a national best.

The numbers represent an impressive comeback from the late ‘90s, when more than 60 people died in a shooting spree in Luxor, home to the famed temple of the same name and the nearby Valley of the Kings.

Visitors vanished. Tourist revenue dried up overnight as Egypt struggled to salvage its reputation as a coveted travel destination. Eventually tourism staged a comeback, tapping the immense drawing power of Egypt’s two specialties: the mummies, pyramids and temples along the Nile, and the glitzy resorts of the Sinai, bordering the Red Sea.

“Guaranteed hot weather -- and cheap,” said Owen, summing up why Britain was so well-represented here, with a contingent estimated in the thousands when Saturday’s bombs went off in rapid succession.

Visitors from Europe, Israel and other Arab nations make up a significant portion of tourists in luxurious Sharm el Sheik, as do wealthy domestic travelers.

Egypt’s Health Ministry has put the death toll at 64, while hospital officials have said 88 died. The vast majority of victims were Egyptians -- many of them employees of hotels and shops -- although the U.S. Embassy in Cairo confirmed Sunday that one American was killed.

“A lot of workers have left Sharm el Sheik, and more will go,” said a man who gave only his first name, Mahmoud, as he sat at the cash register in a convenience store near one bomb site. “You see the number of buses leaving now and the people who want to go, and to tell you the truth, I would leave as well.”

Ayman Mohammed, who works in a pharmacy along Sharm el Sheik’s main strip of restaurants and stores, expressed hope that the area would be back on its feet in three or four months. Some of the landlords have already lowered rents for their merchant tenants, Mohammed said, adding, “People pull together in such a crisis.”

But a recovery could prove more difficult this time because of a string of attacks that have marred Egypt’s reputation as a vacation spot. Last October, bombings in the Sinai, in the resort towns of Taba and Nuweiba, killed 34 people.

In April, a series of attacks hit Cairo, one of them at a popular outdoor bazaar in which an American and two French nationals were killed.

Egyptian authorities have suggested a link between Saturday’s attacks and those in the Taba area. Officials said the large presence of Israeli tourists was a likely motive for targeting Taba, an attack ascribed to a radical group possibly affiliated with Al Qaeda and one of the two Islamist organizations to claim responsibility for Saturday’s bombings.

Derek Plumbly, the British ambassador to Egypt, said there had been no specific warnings about a strike on Sharm el Sheik, also host to recent summits between Israeli and Palestinian leaders. But generally, Plumbly said, “we have said for some time that there is a high threat of terrorism in Egypt.”

Such warnings did not deter John Cooper from bringing his family over from England for the second year in a row. As busloads of frightened tourists beat a hasty path to the Sharm el Sheik airport, some visitors, like Cooper, vowed to complete their vacations -- if only because the “law of averages,” as one woman said stoically, militated against another attack.

“We’ve seen bombs in London, we’ve seen bombs in Madrid, we’ve seen bombs all over Europe. You can’t go on holiday anywhere” if you let fear prevail, Cooper, 46, said. “It’s not an Egyptian issue. We shouldn’t take it out on the Egyptian tourism industry.”