This year, Cyprus’s tourist arrival went down 50 percent

Friday, December 17, 2021

In Cyprus in 2021, the coronavirus caused a 50 per cent drop in tourist arrivals compared to 2019, the last year before the beginning of Covid-19, Deputy Tourism Minister Savvas Perdios has said.

This decline hit the economy massively of the eastern Mediterranean island, as the tourism and travel sector contributed 22.7 per cent to its GDP, which in 2019 totaled 21.1 billion euros ($23.9 billion).

Xinhua news agency reported that tourist arrivals in 2019 reached four million, contributing about 2.7 billion euros to the economy.

In 2021, the contribution of tourism to the economy was estimated at between 55 per cent and 60 per cent of tourism income in 2019, Perdios mentioned.

“Given the pandemic circumstances, income from tourism this year was satisfactory,” he said.

In 2022, the current outlook for tourism was quite sacceptable, he added.

“However, the onset of the highly infectious Omicron mutation of Covid-19 has raised several questions, which cannot be answered right now,” Perdios said.

The health authorities of Cypriot have gone on board on an all-out effort to delay as long as possible the spread of the new variant after the detection of the first five cases earlier in December in a secondary school.

All 500 students of the school have been tested, with no more cases detected.

However, the authorities are quite worried over the anticipated arrival of hundreds of university students from the United Kingdom, for the Christmas and New Year holidays.

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