Mubasher: The number of GCC visitors to Qatar slid 47% during the full-year 2017 on the back of Qatar’s diplomatic rift, which resulted in decreasing the country’s visitors to 23.2%, according to the data released by Qatar’s Tourism Authority on Monday.
GCC tourists’ number reached 752,876 last year, compared to 1.41 million in 2016, especially after the quartet —Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt — boycotted the world’s biggest LNG exporter since last summer, the data showed.
The crisis drove Qatar to extend flight times and increase their costs for non-national residents of those countries, in addition to introducing a visa waiver for citizens of more than 80 countries, according to the report.
As for visitors from other Arab countries, their numbers decreased 25.5% to 165,300 during 2017 instead of 221,900 a year earlier.
Visitor arrivals of nationals of the Americas and other Asia including Oceania were marginally down by 1.2% and 1.3%, respectively.
Over the full-year 2017, Qatar’s tourists levelled down 23.2% to 2.25 million from 2.94 million in the same period the prior year.
