Tunisia turning towards the Chinese outbound tourism market

On yet another trip, your humble editor visited yet two more UNESCO World Heritage Sites, Tunis, which features the Medina (old city) and the ruins of Carthage, which ruled the Mediterranean Sea before losing to the Roman Empire in the three Punic Wars most of Western readers will dimly remember from history lessons in school. At the same time, 2,200 years ago, Qinshi Huangdi for the first time united China and had the Terracotta Army in Xi’an produced to guard his gravesite.

Tunisia did away with the need for Chinese to apply for a visa when visiting the country in February last year, following the example of the Kingdom of Morocco, which scrapped the visa requirement in June 2016.

The arrival numbers from China have developed impressively. Comparing just the arrivals in the first half of each year, the numbers grew from 2,000 in H1 2016 to 8,000 in H1 2017 and 15,000 in H1 2018. However, even the 2018 number represents only a fifth of a per mille of all outbound travels, meaning that only one out of 5,000 Chinese outbound travellers visits Tunisia. For the Tunisian tourism industry likewise 15,000 arrivals count for less than half a percent of all international arrivals in H1 2018 […]

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Image: The Antonine Baths by Dennis Jarvis Source: Flickr Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)