Help “Normalize international relationships with a bloody regime” are helping European travel agencies that resume tours to Syria – a country where the war is still going. Such travel agencies, as Deutsche Welle reports, several.
“Biblical cities, ancient cultures and appetizing delicacies” offered to tourists in Berlin, a company with partly speaking names of Soviet Tours, previously specializing, by the way, on tours in Russia and the “post-Soviet space”. “After many years of the ruined Civil War, Syria gradually begins to return to the level of normal life, unprecedented years,” adds another Berlin company Rocky Road Travel. All of them are planning to “restart” tours in Syria in 2022, arguing that the target audience will be found – tourists “are definitely curious, and they are clearly ready to see the country with their own eyes … regardless of headlines and rhetoric.” At the same time, as the edition adds, German travel agencies are not alone – the British Lupine Travel and Untamed Borders also added tours to Syria in 2022. And the French CLIO, “deployed” in Paris, has already drove tourists to Syria in 2019 and in 2022 intends to repeat. Also, the publication declares that tourist visas in Syria are available for group trips since 2018, and a number of Chinese and Russian tour operators have previously advertised travel there.
“Pleasure” at the same time not cheap: Group tours in Syria are worth about 2,000 euros for a nine-day journey – and without flight. European tourists fly to Beirut (Lebanon) open to them, and then they move across the border to areas controlled by the Syrian government, and are directed to Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and the Syrian coast. At the same time, travel agencies assure that all visited areas are far from the zones of hostilities. How not to forget to emphasize Deutsche Welle, on its websites all the tour operators insist on what they do, “is not political.”
Edition also reminds that before the beginning of the civil war in 2011, tourism was up to 10% of the gross domestic product of Syria and the country took more than 10 million people per year, “receiving” about $ 6.3 billion. The return of tourists to the country, by the way, was recorded since 2016, and in 2019 their number was 2.42 million. Next, the German edition, making reversals “expelled Syrian governments”, which fight for human rights from Washington, calculated that if every tour from Germany from the two above-mentioned agencies will be sold out and next year will be involved from eight to 20 people on a trip, this is not will be more than 400 people for the entire 2022 year.