Tunisia's Ministry of Tourism and Handicrafts has affirmed that tourists exceeded six million by the end of August 2019. The record is the first over the past years.
The sector’s revenues surpass TND4 billion (around USD1.3 billion), and this number hasn’t been reached before, according to economists.
The increase was estimated at 46 percent compared to the results of the same period last year.
Despite the huge revival of the tourism sector, the achieved results, especially in the European market, are still far from the pre-2011 revolution outcomes.
According to the ministry’s figures, European visitors were estimated at around two million tourists during the first eight months of the current year. However, these traditional European markets provided in 2009 around 3.748 million tourists while the total saw minimum of 4.1 million in 2008 .
European markets are significant because, for several decades, they represented the backbone of the Tunisian tourism sector.
Based on these results, it is possible that visitors would exceed nine million by the end of the season in case political, security and social stability continues and terrorist attacks are not repeated – similar to 2015 when a hotel was attacked in Sousse.
