The Vice President of the CTO, Costas Koumis, referred to the stance taken by Stavros Malas in the debate and in his avoidance to speak on the issue of tourism through his personal Facebook account.
Specifically, according to Costas Koumis, the Presidential candidate for the presidency of the Republic, tried to touch several sub-sectors of the economy in last Wednesday's big debate, but diligently avoided, as he stated, touching the tourism sector and did not do so, nor when President Anastasiadis made a report.
"I would like to remind everyone, continues the Vice President of the CTO, that in an interview published in electronic media on February 11, 2013, Mr. Malas stated the following":
"If we work effectively in terms of accessibility of these tourists in the areaWith our low cost and a distribution that ensures seasonality, then we have the opportunity to increase the tourist flow to a point that will attract at least another 300 thousand tourists per year. This will offer directly to the Cypriot economy, an amount of about 400 million euros in turnover. We also suggest an immediate upgrade of our tourism product with the creation of marinas, golf courses and high quality casinos. ”
All this, says Costas Koumis, just a few days after the statistical service of the country published a total number of arrivals for the year 2012, 2.464.908 tourist visitors. That is, Mr. Malas set as a goal of arrivals the total number of 2.765 arrivals. He had set the bar very low, that is.
In his post, the Vice President of Tourism states that today, five years later, the Anastasiadis government is entitled to be proud that without having burdened the state budget, it has broken every record of arrivals in tourism.
He also criticizes the statements of Stavros Malas, stating that “2016 closed, as he states, with 3.186.531 arrivals and in 2017 with 3.652.073 arrivals, ie with 900 thousand more tourists than those set by Mr. Malas at the time and his staff ”.
According to Mr. Koumis, this increase was certainly not accidental, since as he notes, Cyprus may have benefited from external factors, but we would never have reached these record numbers if the government did not take the appropriate measures.
Improving the air connection of our country to the maximum, he states in his post, and adopting policies of inexpensive incentives such as urban incentives, far from political ideologies of other times that, as he states, “the government of 2008–2013, the The government has laid the groundwork for a real shift in tourism. ”
The post goes on to say that “the tourism product of our country has literally been reborn and the tourism of our country has essentially entered a stage of transition. The old was replaced by the renovated, the loss-making by the profitable and the Cypriot began to slowly return to the tourism industry. The growth rate of the country's tourism is far from the average of global tourism. The infrastructure projects, which were correctly suggested by Mr. Malas at the time, are being implemented by the Anastasiadis government. However, no project could be implemented if the economy of our country did not return to growth rates ", the post concludes.
Famagusta.News