The number of tourists has seen continuous growth. In the period of eight years, there has been increase of 100 percents. This year it is expected the number of foreign tourists to exceed 450 thousand. Most common are visitors from Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and the Netherlands, and new target groups are from China, and North America where it will be offered the active tourism.
This in interview with MIA highlights the Director of the Agency for Promotion and Support of Tourism, Christian Dzambazovski.
-We have successfully finalized previous 2013 and achieved and exceeded what we projected. So, we have increase of 14 percents of foreign tourists, which is 2.5 times more than the world average according to the World Tourism Organization. Our forecasts are that by the end of 2014 the figure will exceed 450 thousand visitors, foreign visitors, said in the interview Dzambazovski.
Most, as he added, in the last year were 72 thousands tourists from Turkey, which were followed by the tourists from Greece, followed by Serbia, the Netherlands, and Bulgaria.
- So that is ranking in the top five in our list by number of visitors. We expect that maybe next year, there will be some displacement since we had number of presentations at the beginning of the year, added Dzambazovski.
Noting numerous presentations at trade shows, announced that new destination is France, China, where there will be independent, and joint performance with the countries of the region, Russia and North America.
Notes that data for this year show increase of five percents and that shows that Macedonia goes in the right direction even though there were natural disasters in the Balkan region.
Subsidies as a measure to attract tourists, said Dzambazovski are giving results.
- The number of applications submitted for subsidies is over 520 and are approved over 1 million euro for organizing tourist trips to Macedonia by the foreign tour operators and in that part, number one are states from the second round with 80 percents approved agents, including the Netherlands, Belgium and the Scandinavian countries. Then, in the first are getting involved Austria and Turkey. Now, we expect to engage Russia given that 65 euro is the subsidy for the Russian market. The result of subsidies can be seen immediately after counting. So, those markets where we were not present in the past, now are among the top five as visitors in Macedonia, said Dzambazovski.
He noted that currently the influx of tourism is 200 million and that its share in GDP gives two percents and is expected to rise for 5 percents by 2020.
