TEHRAN – Iran’s tourism revenues were $6.2 billion in 2022, Ali-Asghar Shalbafian said on Wednesday.

“According to the [latest] report of the World Travel and Tourism Council, Iran earned 6.2 billion dollars from foreign tourists last year,” Shalbafian said, addressing a travel conference held in the ancient city of Tabriz.

“Last year, some 50 billion dollars were earned from non-oil revenues,” the official noted to make a comparison.

Elsewhere in his remarks, he referred to a considerable volume of travel-reliant investment flows in the country, saying: “Tourism projects worth more than 3.600 trillion rials (some $7.2 billion) are currently underway across the Islamic Republic.”

Based on the WTTC report, Iran’s tourism industry achieved 39 percent year-on-year growth in 2020 when the total expenditure by foreign tourists hit $6.2 billion, which is a 73.5% increase compared to the year before.

Moreover, the report says that Iran has managed to witness the revival of the tourism industry in two consecutive years. While the country’s tourism industry faced a 45% drop in its share of the GDP in 2020, the share of this industry in the economy experienced a 40% jump in 2021.

The share of the tourism industry in the total economy of Iran in 2022 also increased by 39.2 percent and reached 4.6 percent of the total economy of Iran, the council reported.

With the boom in tourism, the job creation rate of this industry in Iran increased by 11.2% in 2022, and the number of people working in this industry increased to 1.44 million. In the same way, the share of the tourism industry in total employment in Iran reached 6.1% in 2022.

Of the total number of foreign tourists who entered Iran in 2022, 55% were Iraqis, and tourists from the Republic of Azerbaijan and Turkey each with 6%, Pakistan with 5%, and Kuwait with 2% were in the next ranks, respectively, IRNA reported.

Foreign tourist arrivals in Iran saw a rise of 50 percent in the first two months of the current Iranian calendar year from a year earlier (started on March 21), the tourism minister last week.

The Islamic Republic has recorded about 850,000 foreign tourist arrivals during the first two months of the year, which shows over 50 percent growth year on year, Ezzatollah Zarghami said.

According to the statistics bureau of the World Tourism Organization, Iran’s foreign tourist arrivals in 2022 rose 315 percent from a year earlier. Data showed around 4.1 million tourists came to the country in 2022, while the Islamic Republic attracted 990,000 tourists in 2021.

The upsurge of foreign tourist arrivals in 2022 was three times the global average growth in this field. Nevertheless, Iran's share in attracting foreign tourists is still small, and only 0.4% of all foreign tourist trips in 2022 have been made to Iran, the report said.

As mentioned by the latest WTTC report, the tourism industry has been able to account for 7.6% of the world's total GDP in 2022.

In 2020, as a result of the coronavirus restrictions, the world tourism industry faced a 50.4% drop in its share of the global economy, and the value of this industry was reduced by 4,900 billion dollars.

However, in 2021 and with the reduction of virus restrictions, a growth of 21.7% was reached in 2022, and the value of the travel industry increased by 7.7 trillion dollars.

Last year, 22 million new jobs were created in the world's tourism industry, which has increased by 7.9% compared to the year earlier.

Moreover, the number of workers in this industry has reached 295 million people, which is equivalent to 9% of the total employment in the world, the report said.

AFM