The Effect of the Egyptian Pound Exchange Rate Change on the International Tourist Demand to Egypt

Despite the importance of the international tourist demand and affected extent by daily changes of exchange rate, there are a few and inadequate studies that have addressed the measurement of the impact of exchange rate change on the international tourism demand for Egypt. therefore, this study aims to measure the effect of the Egyptian pound Exchange Rate change on the international tourist demand to Egypt from 2010 to 2017.For this purpose, field researches conducted using questionnaires for sample of international tourists and interviews with tourism and Economic experts. This study is based on an exploratory approach to achieve its goals.
The main results of this study indicate that there is some countries are affected by the change of the Egyptian Pound exchange rate and others who are not affected by it. It was found that the most sensitive countries to changes of Egyptian Pound exchange rate are Russia, China and India. In contrast, USA and Germany are the less sensitive countries to the changes of Egyptian pound exchange rate.
In addition, there is an inverse relationship between the international tourist demand to Egypt and the change of the exchange rate. When the floating system for the Egyptian pound exchange rate was applied, it reduced the value of the Egyptian pound exchange rate in 2016. It also resulted in an increase in the number of international tourists, to 8.3 million tourists in 2017 compared to 5.4 million tourists in 2016. Moreover, the Tourism revenues were about 7.6 billion in 2017, compared to 2.6 billion in 2016. Besides applying the floating system for the Egyptian pound exchange rate which led to the increase in the international tourist demand, there were other factors that led to these increases such as political stability in Egypt.