Algeria must forge its own identity to hit tourism targets

Alamy/Hamdi Bendali

• Algeria aiming for 12m tourists
• Currently far behind neighbours
• High-end market offers hope

If Algeria’s tourism industry is to become the vital engine of the country’s economy its tourism minister hopes, it must find a way to differentiate itself from its neighbours, experts have told AGBI.

The Algerian government aims to welcome more than 12 million foreign visitors by the end of the decade, as part of its national tourism development plan for 2030. 

In October, Mokhtar Didouche, the minister of tourism, presented an upbeat review of the sector in Algeria in 2024, saying the country had received a surge in visitors. But it still lags far behind its neighbours.

In 2023, Tunisia hosted 9 million visitors and Morocco received 14.5 million. In the first quarter of 2024, Morocco received 3 million visitors — the same number that Algeria received in the whole of 2023.

The country is home to seven Unesco world heritage sites, ranging from Roman towns at Timgad and Djemila to the Casbah, the ancient centre of Algiers, to fortified hill villages.

It also has a powerful natural offering, from pine-cloaked mountains and Mediterranean beaches to huge tracts of near-empty desert in the Saharan south. 

Yet in the first quarter of 2024, Algeria received only 800,000 visitors.

The World Travel and Tourism Council said international tourists in Algeria spent $246 million in 2023, higher than the pre-pandemic figure of $165 million in 2019. They are expected to spend more in 2024.

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Nehad Benz runs Algerian Maze, a local tourism company that caters to guests from overseas. She says she has received more than 2,100 visitors in the past three years from China, Russia, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere.

“The number is increasing each year,” Benz says. “Most of them have no idea about the country, and they just come and discover it for the first time. Algeria is a hidden gem.”

Harry van Schaick, managing editor for Africa at the Oxford Business Group, says: “There is much space to grow for Algeria’s tourism sector, and ensuring this comes from the high end of the market should be a priority.”

This approach reduces pressure on the environment, housing, and other infrastructure. Critically for Algeria – unused to hosting swathes of tourists – it reduces negative effects on locals brought on by a sudden influx of outsiders, van Schaik says. 

He points to protests in Spain as an example of what happens if a local population experiences “over-tourism”.

“By targeting the high-end market, Algeria could build a more solid visitor base that is less likely to be vulnerable to cost of living pressures back in their home countries, with higher average per capita spend per tourist,” he says. 

Attracting more high-end tourists requires marketing abroad as well as investment at home, an investment that van Schaik says “could boost professionalisation in other parts of the economy that could also benefit from infrastructure development, job creation and greater foreign investment”.

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Vincenzo Zappino, senior partner at Target Euro, a consultancy focused on social and economic growth through tourism, says that Algeria must “differentiate itself from the mass tourism model adopted by its neighbouring countries, Tunisia and Morocco”.

This means increasing accessibility, improving accommodation and adapting the tourism offer itself, Zappino says.

Algeria should seek to strengthen existing tourism products, such as cultural and gastronomic offerings, and explore ways to harness innovations to enhance experiences, Zappino says.

“This could include, for example, the use of 3D technology in museums, or creating digitalised routes for trekking and motorbiking enthusiasts.”

Improving both external and internal access is crucial. One critical issue in Algeria is ease of entry. Most Western tourists enter Morocco and Tunisia easily, visa-free or with a visa-on-arrival scheme. In Algeria, however, most foreigners must obtain a visa before arrival in the country, by visiting a local consulate. 

The country has been trying to ease this roadblock by offering visas on arrival to tourists in the country’s southern regions. But entry into these areas has not been without its difficulties, and the oasis town of Djanet was the scene of a major setback.

Alamy/Jackie Ellis

In early October, a Swiss woman was murdered in Djanet, in the country’s Saharan south. It was the first killing of a foreigner in Algeria in several years, but was a reminder of the country’s complicated history of terrorism in the Sahel region south of the Sahara, and civil war in the 1990s.

“The occasional killing of a tourist, even if it occurs violently, has a minimal impact on the long-term reputation of a tourist destination,” Zappino says.

“The real threat to a destination’s reputation comes from political instability and national insecurity. In these cases, the impact is more significant and long-lasting, leading to a loss of competitiveness and an important decline in international tourist arrivals.”

The UK Foreign Office considers most of Algeria safe for visitors, but advises against all travel to within 30km of Algeria’s borders with Libya, Mauritania, Mali and Niger, as well as Tunisia in the provinces of Illizi and Ouargla and in the Chaambi mountains. It advises against all but essential travel to the rest of Tunisia’s border.