MANAMA, 14 September 2003 — Bahrain attracted 4.6 million visitors in 2002 and expects a five percent increase this year, the Ministry of Information’s undersecretary for tourism said yesterday.
“More than a million tourists visited Bahrain during the first quarter of 2003,” Mubarak Al-Atawi told a press conference on the occasion of the 24th World Tourism Conference to be held in Manama on Sept. 22.
According to official statistics, in 2001 Bahrain drew 4.4 million visitors of which nearly 94 percent used the King Fahd causeway linking Bahrain with Saudi Arabia.
In 2000, 3.3 million visited the archipelago, spending nearly $2 billion compared to some $780 million in 1995.
There are currently 88 hotels in the sun-drenched Gulf state, of various ratings, employing around 6,000 people, of which a third are Bahraini nationals.
As the only Gulf state to have run out of oil to export, Bahrain has launched a string of ambitious tourism projects topping $2 billion to diversify sources of revenue.
