Brazil’s tourism minister has said the country is planning to attract about a million tourists from the Middle East in the next three years by launching more direct flights from the UAE to the Amazon and the northeast regions.
Before the pandemic, around 75 percent of the tourist traffic between Brazil and the Middle East was from and to the UAE, said Gilson Machado Neto, who was on a visit to the UAE.
He said the annual outbound and inbound tourist traffic from Brazil to the Middle East was around 125,000 and 120,000 respectively.
“Even when the numbers go up in the coming years, we expect the same trend. Around 75 percent of the tourist traffic will be from and to the UAE,” Neto told the local media.
He said more Brazilians will love to visit the UAE once new flights are launched.
“Brazilians are very interested in your culture and to see how everything works here the huge buildings that you have here, how you make those [manmade] islands around Dubai,” he said.
Two daily flights operated by Emirates from Dubai to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in Brazil were the only direct flights from the UAE to Latin America before the coronavirus outbreak. Emirates has already resumed direct flights to Sao Paulo.
He said ecotourism would help tourist traffic grow ten times and added that the Brazilian government was in touch with the Emirati authorities on launching more direct flights from the UAE to the airports in Brazil’s Amazon and the Northeast regions.
Neto said, “New flights from the UAE, an aviation hub in the Middle East, will help tourist traffic grow around ten times, from about 120,000 to a million, in the next three years.”
He said Many Brazilians would love to travel to the UAE but high airfares were a challenge. But more direct flights could cut the airfare by at least 30 percent, he said.
