Tourist arrivals drop in Myanmar

[darnott@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Tourist arrivals drop in Myanmar 

Xinhua, Yangon, 26 October 1999.   A total of 138,561 foreign 
tourists visited Myanmar in the first half of this year and 80,572 
of them came by land routes through border points. 

The latest figures of the official economic indicators show that 
the number of tourist arrivals during the half-year period dropped 
by 1.57  percent compared with the same period of last year. 

The figures also show that in 1998, a total of 279,335 foreign 
tourists came to Myanmar which earned just over 33 million 
U.S. dollars from tourism in the year. 

Up to the end of March this year, there was a total of 492 hotels 
in operation in Myanmar with 13,984 rooms.  There were also 521 
licensed tour companies including 508 local companies, 12 joint 
ventures and one foreign company. 

The country hopes to boost the number of tourist arrivals to 500,000 
annually. Since Myanmar adopted the open-door economic policy 
in late 1988, foreign investment in the sector of hotels and tourism 
has reached 1.1 billion dollars in 30 projects. 

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