After the crash of EgyptAir flight MS804 in the Mediterranean Sea last week, Egyptian Tourism Minister Yehia Rashed said Egypt needs to work ”ten times harder” to revitalize its increasingly struggling tourism industry. However, the minister is not all that worried about the effect the crash will have on Egypt’s tourism, he said in an interview with Reuters. “The efforts that we need to put are maybe 10 times what we planned to put in place but we need to focus on our ability to drive business back to Egypt to change the image of Egypt. “What we need to understand is this is an incident that could have taken place anywhere. Aviation incidents happen, unfortunately,” he said. Speaking to Bloomberg, he said that Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous nation, is maintaining its forecast that ten million tourists will visit it in 2017, generating USD 12 billion of income. “Nothing has changed in my view,” he said. Egypt’s tourism industry, one of the main sectors of income for the Egyptian economy and a crucial foreign exchange earner for the country, has suffered since the outbreak of the 2011 uprising…
