The statistics on the number of tourists coming to Syria, issued by the Ministry of Tourism, have always sparked discussions and disagreements among observers and the media.
This is not a matter related to the period after the events of the Syrian revolution, but rather dates back to before 2011.
Many media circles have always doubted these numbers, demanding that the ministry define the tourist first, as it considered the Lebanese and Jordanians who were visiting Syria for a few hours for the purpose of shopping, as tourists, while the real criterion should be through the hotel nights that this tourist spent.
Here, the gap and paradox quickly appeared when the ministry reviewed the number of hotel nights compared to the number of tourists it mentioned, which can be read through the data revealed today by the Minister of Tourism, Mohammad Rami Martini.
Martini announced that the number of Arab and foreign visitors to Syria since the beginning of the year until September 25 reached 1,680,000, excluding Lebanese arrivals due to the Israeli aggression, an increase of 5 percent over the same period last year.
The minister told Al-Watan newspaper that the number of hotel guests reached 227,000 by the end of August 2024, of whom 193,000 were Arab guests with 108,000 nights, and 34,000 were foreign guests with 140,000 nights.
In other words, out of 1,680,000 tourists, only 227,000 tourists used hotels, which can be considered the real number of tourists, according to many observers.
On the other hand, the minister added that the number of tourists who visited Syria for religious tourism purposes reached 150,000 by the end of last August, spending more than a million hotel nights, and they are from (Iraq, Pakistan, India, Bahrain, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, the Netherlands and Australia).
If this number is subtracted from the previous number of 227,000 Arabs and foreigners, we will get the real number of Arab and foreign tourists who visited Syria in ten months, which is less than 80,000 only.
As for the Syrians who visited their country, the Minister of Tourism stated that their number until mid-September reached 2.1 million arrivals, an increase of 25 percent over last year, excluding the Syrians returning to their country from Lebanon during the last ten days of last September.
The Minister indicated that the number of Syrian guests by the end of August this year reached about 676 thousand Syrian guests, an increase of 9 percent over the same period last year, during which they spent 1.355 million nights.
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