News on Travel and Tourism

There's a new building in town, and it isn't a military barracks or a hospital. It's a Tourist Information Center. Even as troops fight militants in the south, government officials and donors in Afghanistan's central Bamiyan valley are training tour guides and teaching restaurateurs about customer service. It's an attempt to draw tourism and return one small part of Afghanistan to normalcy. The challenges are many — land mines, dangerous roads outside Bamiyan, and, not least, Afghanistan's reputation as anything but a tourist haven. But ...

The U.N. World Tourism Organization says international tourism fell 8 percent between January and April compared to the same period last year, blaming the global financial crisis and the swine flu outbreak. The UNWTO also revised its 2009 tourism forecast downward. It predicts tourism will decline by 4 percent to 6 percent this year, but says the decline's pace should slow throughout the rest of the year. In the first quarter, 269 million traveled ...

The economic crisis means that Spanish hotels will have more domestic than foreign tourists this summer for the first time in decades, an industry official predicted Friday. In the 1980s an estimated 70 percent of tourists were foreigners, Roman Estalella, head of the Spanish Confederation of Hotels and Tourist Accommodation, told the Europa Press news agency. This year, "Spaniards will spend less on travel by staying" within the country, while the number of overseas tourists will be down by 8.0 percent as the economic crisis hits both Spain iteself ...