ArmInfo.The Tourism Federation of Armenia expects a decrease in the tourist flow by the end of 2020 by 80%. Chairman of the Tourism Federation Mekhak Apresyan announced this at a press conference on January 13. In this vein, he noted that the approximate number of tourists who visited Armenia in the previous year will be about 350 thousand tourists, against 1.5 million in 2019.
At the same time, Apresyan said that according to the World Tourism Organization, in the first 10 months of 2020, the number of travel visits in the world decreased by 72% or 900 million compared to the previous year. By the end of the year, the decline, according to him, will be fixed at 70-75% per annum. "Thus, the number of tourist visits in the annual context will be reduced by 1 billion," the head of the Federation said. Returning to the situation in the tourism sector, Apresyan noted that some revival was observed exclusively in terms of domestic tourism, despite the fact that the dynamics was negative. But companies that only deal with international tourism are still stagnating despite government assistance programs. In this vein, he explained that the anti-crisis government measures, which involved a six-month delay in payments for tourism companies, need to revise the conditions, in particular, to extend the maturity of payments by a year, at least until April. Apresyan explained this need by the fact that the companies did not manage to recover their income in order to fulfill their payment obligations due to the outbreak of hostilities. "Today we are faced with the task of saving the sphere from destruction. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a special program for the tourism industry, which would have the prerequisites and foundations not only for preventing the consequences of coronavirus and hostilities, but also for further development, '' he said. At the same time, the expert noted that before developing such a program, it is necessary to conduct discussions with the private sector, and not vice versa. "This should be a principle for us," he stressed.
