Travel and Escape

The global financial and economic crisis has caused severe problems to many sectors of the economy, including the tourist industry. For a country like Morocco, whose main sources of income are tourism, mainly from EU countries and the USA, and the flow of transfers by Moroccans Living Abroad (MLAs), this crisis may seem a like a real threat to its economy, that received a tourist revenue of 57 billion dirhams in 2008, approx. 20% of its GNP. This is particularly obvious if we consider that revenues from tourism have fallen by 20% in the first months of 2009 with regards to the same period in 2008, from 4.33 to 3.46 billions of dirhams. But the Moroccan tourist industry has the potential to avoid the negative effects of the crisis, or even benefit from the changes undergone by the sector.

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