Security personnel wait to screen passengers departing Sharm el-Sheikh global Airport, south Sinai, Egypt, Friday, November 6, 2015.
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The plane disaster prompted Russian Federation to halt normal flights to Egypt, and Britain restricted flights to Sharm el-Sheikh.
The most significant losses for tourism operators have come from their need to fly empty planes to Egypt to evacuate Russian tourists, according to Russian Tourism Industry Union spokeswoman Irina Tyurina.
An Egyptian member of the global team investigating the crash last week told Reuters that they were “90% sure” that a sound heard in the last moments of the recording of the plane’s cockpit voice recorder was an explosion caused by a bomb.
But, he said Wednesday, failures in security at Sharm el-Sheikh airport may have enabled the attack.
“The lights will not be going out in Sharm al-Sheikh”, Sisi told reporters in the Red Sea resort.
British and American officials have expressed growing confidence that the cause of the crash was an explosive device that was somehow brought aboard, leading several countries to stop flights to Sharm el-Sheikh over security concerns. Russian Federation and Britain have both put an embargo on Egypt flight – the two countries account for a large percentage of the Middle Eastern state’s visitors.
A few 80 percent of reservations have been cancelled and at least 40 percent of tourists have left the Egyptian resort since the crash, said Hussein Fawzy, head of the region’s chamber of tourist facilities.
“We are endeavouring to process as many people as possible through the airport as safely and quickly as we can”, it said.
A senior Russian official said that Moscow’s decision to suspend flights was unlikely to be reversed soon.
There has been little mention of the incident on Egyptian state television. Egyptian authorities said no one survived in the crash.
Philip Hammond has said a “cultural problem” lay at the heart of shortcomings in Egyptian airport security, as he laid blame for last month’s Russian plane crash on the apparent failure to prevent a bomb being smuggled on board.
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“The scare for declining markets is that once they emerge from their troubled situation, they might find themselves challenged by a well-established competition”, said Nadejda Popova, airlines analyst at market researchers Euromonitor worldwide.
