Tourism to Israel, badly damaged by rocket fire from Gaza during an Israeli offensive, should bounce back later in the year, Tourism Minister Uzi Landau said on Tuesday.
More than 3.5 million visitors came to Israel in 2013, pumping some 40 billion shekels ($12 billion) into the economy and 1.9 million came in the first six months of the year.
Landau said the tourist industry had been on course for 4-4.1 million visitors in all this year. But the Gaza flare-up that began on July 8 caused a 35 percent plunge in visitors at a cost of $500 million in lost revenue for the third quarter, according to an Israel Hotel Association (IHA) estimate.
That loss was “far too much” for a country that relies on tourism for as much as 6 percent of its GDP , Landau told Reuters in an interview.
“This year we would have had 4 to 4.1 million. It won’t get there. It is not going to be a great year, another record year, as we had hoped, but we still hope for a good year. We hope to have at least the figure of last year. We believe things will be back on track in the next three, four months,” he said.
Over the past month, during the peak of the tourist season, some 3,000 rockets were launched into Israel from Gaza, causing mass cancellations by foreign visitors; many Israelis themselves aborted travel plans within the country for their holidays.
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