Amid declining tourist numbers, cash-strapped bazaar owners in Luxor block roads to Valley of Kings, Hatshepsut Temple to demand rent exemptions.
Bazaar owners in the Upper Egyptian city of Luxor on Sunday cut off the main road leading to the Valley of the Kings and the Hatshepsut Temple – both of which represent major tourist attractions – to demand exemptions from the rent they pay for their shops.
The bazaar owners' action brought the movement of tour busses to a halt, leading several tourist agencies to cancel scheduled trips to the two historical sites.
Tourism workers in Luxor have seen their income deteriorate sharply in recent months due to ongoing political instability countrywide. Egypt's tourism sector received another blow last week after 18 foreign tourists were killed in a hot air balloon accident in Luxor.
Bazaar owners, who rent their shops from Egypt's antiquities ministry, threatened shut down the city's historic sites for three days until their demands were met.
"Shop rents range from LE400 to LE4500 per month," Bakry Abdel Gelil, head of the Luxor Bazaar Owners Association, told Al-Ahram's Arabic-language news website. "How do they expect us to pay this amount given the current dearth of tourists?"
The antiquities ministry on Sunday announced that it planned to tie shop rents to tourist inflows in each district in hopes of easing pressure on bazaar owners.
"We will restructure the rent structure for bazaars in Luxor to accommodate sharp declines in tourism revenue," Antiquities Minister Mohamed Ibrahim stated on Sunday. "This way we hope to ease the financial burden on bazaar owners until tourism picks up again."
Despite the minister's statement, however, shop owners refused to open the road.
"They don't trust the government's promises; they want action," Al-Ahram's reporter in Luxor Iman El-Hawary said. "Some of these shop owners risk going to jail because they were late paying rent. They have received promises before, but these promises weren't kept."
Source: http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/66011.aspx
Egyptian bazaar owners block road to historic sites in Luxor
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Re: Egyptian bazaar owners block road to historic sites in L
This was called off this afternoon. Mansour phoned me and said the valley was reopened at 4:15
Jane Akshar - mad about egyptology -sane otherwise ....... I think
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Re: Egyptian bazaar owners block road to historic sites in L
Did they prevent Tourist Vehicles from entering the Site?? If so that would have been a day to remember.
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Re: Egyptian bazaar owners block road to historic sites in L
The reason they called it off was because they had ran out of nails to hammer another one into the declining tourist numbers coffin.
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Re: Egyptian bazaar owners block road to historic sites in L
On the positive side, I have never seen as many large coaches at the Memnon and the Ramesseum as there were today at lunch time. These sites were benefitting from the changed plans of the tour companies.
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Re: Egyptian bazaar owners block road to historic sites in L
For individuals and families who have lived multigenerationally off of tourism it will be very interesting to see what they turn to doing as tourism continues to decline. There will always be a certain percentage who will never even consider other opportunities and who will never even try for other income sources. Theirs will be a very hard row to hoe. Given Egyptian society as I know it it can be very difficult to uproot and move and it isn't like jobs are plentiful and/or that the average Egyptian is coming with a large skill set mployers are looking for or repetroire that is transferable to other employment situations.
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