Promoting Nostalgia Tourism to Egypt

Abstract

Nostalgia plays an important role in tourism industry as it promotes "slices of the past" encouraging human beings to remember and have a desire to return to a place from their past. Moreover, nostalgia is one of the main reasons for tourists to travel to their ancestors' lands as 'heritage tourists,' 'roots tourists,' 'diaspora tourists' and 'pilgrims'. Increasing number of current immigrants and their descendants take the opportunity to return to their ancestral home as a result of changes in economy, political forms, and technology. For them, a temporal return to their homeland in a form of tourism, or "nostalgia tourism," might be an attractive option. A quantitative research was carried out depending on distributing 400 questionnaires on the Egyptian migrants to examine their nostalgia to visit the homeland, as well as to explore the impact of owing second-home in Egypt on their participating in nostalgia tourism. The main results approved that more than 70% of them feel nostalgia to visit Egypt for visiting their friends and relatives and to see their ancestral homeland. In addition, the study revealed that 57.1% of respondents have a property in Egypt and 58.1% of them use their homes in Egypt for vacation purposes.