PHOTO: Elie Sidawi has seen many changes over 40 years of operating tours in the Middle East. (photo courtesy Sunny Land Tours)
Sunny Land Tours is celebrating its 50th anniversary since its founding. Elie Sidawi started operating tours from Beirut, Lebanon, in 1964 and established his company in 1965 as a Middle Eastern inbound tour operator. Today Sunny Land is a U.S.-based outbound tour operator offering travel to 25 destinations.
As an operator of tours in the Middle East for 50 years, Sidawi watches news events in the Middle East closely. In spite of the tragedy playing out in Israel and Gaza now, Sidawi is hopeful that a peaceful solution will be achieved soon.
TravelPulse interviewed Elie Sidawi at his office in Florida and he reflected on the company history and on his hopes for the Middle East. Here are some excerpts of that conversation.
Elie Sidawi:
We have had a long history of promoting tours to Israel as well as Palestine, the occupied territories and all of the Middle East. We've been marketing programs to the Middle East since before the 1967 war that changed the formation of an old map of the area. Sunny Land Tours started as a Middle East tour operator.
I started the company in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1965 as a Middle East-Holy Land tour operator. We carried groups from U.S. tour operators that specialized in pilgrimage tours to the Holy Land. We were capturing those groups in Beirut, going through Damascus and Palmyra, then into Amman and Petra then over the Mandelbaum Gate entering Jerusalem, the Old City, continuing through all the Biblical areas, the sites and shrines in the Old City of Jerusalem and on to Nazareth, Tiberias and Galilee.
This program was disrupted because of the 1967 war when the map of Israel and the Middle East was changed. The Six Day War ended with Israel occupying the Sinai Peninsula and part of the Golan Heights of Syria and taking over the West Bank as part of historical Israel. So I had to move out of Beirut.
Lebanon was in a state of war with Israel with no communication whatsoever, so I could not continue doing business as usual going from Lebanon to Jerusalem. That route was completely cut off because Jordan and Egypt and Lebanon were in a state of war with Israel.
For me to continue with my business I had to move to the United States in 1967. Then I was conducting my operation not as an inbound tour operator but as an outbound wholesale tour company from the United States. I started slowly with the little means that I had to develop programs going out of the U.S. into Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and continuing into Israel through the two borders that were available for exchange of tourists from Jordan to Israel. One is the Allenby Bridge and the other one is in the Sheik Hussein Bridge in the north of Israel. That's the only way I could operate a program outside of the Middle East to Israel. I could not have done so from Lebanon.
The business thrived and we started offering multiple programs, especially after the situation eased and the peace treaty was enacted between Egypt and Israel and between Jordan and Israel. It became easier for us to combine different and variable itineraries to the Middle East that would combine the Holy Land sites and Israel and the West Bank with Egypt and Jordan.
Now we have groups coming into Dubai and going to Jordan and then crossing over into Israel. The situation has eased a lot, and I can see that there is going to have to be a settlement pretty soon because everybody from the Israeli side and the Arab side, including the Palestinians, and I dare say even the leaders of Hamas in Gaza are all wishing and willing to settle the situation for everyone's sake so everybody can enjoy life with peace and tranquility and also enhance and improve the situation for the people, and for commerce and trade and all that is available in the Middle East. Everybody will benefit if the situation will come to fruition, and I think it will.
That's what my experience was, and my future vision is that the Middle East is going to be one of the most active and financially prosperous places with dramatic changes for the better of all the inhabitants of the area. The Middle East is a beautiful place to visit. It has all the historical and religious shrines and it has all the Egyptian archaeology and history, and wonderful people to meet, hospitable and well mannered and they respect the tourists wherever you go.
Even in these situations where there is hostility between the warring parties, they always respect and assure the safety of the tourists because they are guests and the Arab world has a tradition for hospitality, even if it's an enemy that comes to visit you. That's an Arabic and Bedouin tradition over the ages.
[BLURB]Even in these situations where there is hostility between the warring parties, they always respect and assure the safety of the tourists because they are guests and the Arab world has a tradition for hospitality, even if it's an enemy that comes to visit you. That's an Arabic and Bedouin tradition over the ages.[/BLURB]
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During all the upheaval in Egypt for the last three years there was not a single tourist who was bothered with anything that was going on in the area. And there have been quite a few upheavals and two or three leadership changes in the past three years.
Because of all the problems we endured as a tour operator of the Middle East, we had to seek new destinations and today Sunny Land Tours operates in 25 destinations. We still value the Middle East operation of the startup company.
In the Middle East there are always interruptions and disputes, but I think the people now in this century think better. A lot of the ordinary people think better than the politicians, in fact. They suffer more than anybody else. And they find that the only way they can enhance their lives is by peaceful means.
That's why I congratulate the effort between the Israeli and Palestinian ladies [Breaking Bread Journeys] who joined together to offer programs in the Middle East in [a Travel Pulse report]. I believe we should encourage this kind of cooperation and joint effort by the people themselves to make an effort to convince the politicians that this is the will of the people.
If you take all these extremists from both sides, 90 percent of the population is with the peace effort. But when you have some gangs of terrorists or some bands that start problems, the Middle East is well known for retaliation. This is well known as being in the culture in Middle East, you know, you kill my brother, I'll kill two of yours. This is what disrupts the process that we all hope for for a peaceful solution.
You may have heard the statement of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu when he accepted the ceasefire offered by Egypt and he declared again, "We are ready for a two-state solution." This is what the Palestinians want - open borders. That's why the politicians in Gaza are against the cessation of hostilities because they are locked in from the sea, from the air from the borders. If the Israelis are willing to settle with two states, why don't you cut off the firing and come and sit down and let's do it?
It's a sad situation when someone is trying to block his own people's benefits because they want conditions for cessation of hostilities of getting open borders open skies. Okay, so the guy is offering you your own state, that would be a clear indication that things will go your way. Don't put in those pre-conditions.
When I heard this I was so encouraged that this thing is going to be resolved and they will stop fighting, that this is going to come to pass, a united Palestinian state between Gaza and the West Bank. Having two locations is not an obstacle. In America we have Hawaii and Alaska. They would have to work out some sort of corridor.
That seems to be the right direction. Let's hope for that. I don't know, I am not a politician, I'm a tour operator, but it would certainly benefit my business if there is peace and tranquility in the Middle East. I think tourism to the Middle East will really boom.
Sunny Land Tours in Egypt
Egypt was a major operation for Sunny Land Tours for a long time. We had a Nile cruise boat in 1975 that we had built in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and shipped it to Egypt when there was nothing more than a few boats sailing the Nile. Today there are 400 of them. We discarded that boat after five or six years. It was a small boat, but it did the job because nobody had access to any cruise cabins.
There were only two cruisers owned by Hilton and the whole world was selling them. We sent our 25-cabin Nile Explorer there and it was booked a year in advance. And 25 years ago we were selling at higher prices than they are selling right now. Imagine that golden opportunity we had. We eventually had an office in Cairo.
When I moved to the United States our biggest operation was in Greece and I opened an office in Athens. And in Morocco we opened an office in Casablanca. At one point we had offices in Beirut, Casablanca, Athens and Cairo. Then I said I am spending more time in the air going back and forth to direct the operations of these offices locally than on the ground. I would be better off assigning it to ground operators and concentrating my efforts on marketing the outgoing operation. And that's what we did.
[BLURB]We moved with the waves. If there were problems between the Turks and the Greeks over Cypress I moved to the Balkan destinations, the Scandinavian destinations, the Iberian destinations. And where I saw we were doing well I would concentrate on those as a flag destination for Sunny Land Tours.[/BLURB][/CALLOUT]
We moved with the waves. If there were problems between the Turks and the Greeks over Cypress I moved to the Balkan destinations, the Scandinavian destinations, the Iberian destinations. And where I saw we were doing well I would concentrate on those as a flag destination for Sunny Land Tours.
Today we have Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Morocco, Costa Rica, Peru and the rest is spread out, South America, Panama, El Salvador. In Europe we're good in the Mediterranean, southern Europe, I mean Greece and Croatia, we are very good in Eastern Europe as well.
We are niche tour operators, not the operator that will send 20 and 30 and 40 thousand passengers. We're not the Globus Gateway type - nothing near that. I don't have an ego to be a large tour operator by numbers, I prefer to run a business that I can totally control and provide the best service. That's why we've been around for 50 years despite all the ups and downs in the business and airlines and tour operators that went bust because of their ambitious ideas of being the biggest and tallest and largest and all that. That's not my forte.
Egypt has always been our most active destination. And I am hoping that now as things calm down a little bit business will come back. Business is picking up in Egypt, thank God, after three years of disappointments. It has never been so bad in 50 years. There was a Six Day War and it was six days. There was a terrorist attack in Luxor at one point. It was a few days and people started going back again. It never took so long.
When the revolution started with ousting Mubarak, then Morsi came in and he went the wrong way I think, so they started the revolution all over again. And by the time they got rid of him it took three years. Now I think the situation is under control because we have someone like Gamal Abdel Nasser. This is a military man. You don't fool around with him. He's got the guns. And he made the point loud and clear. If you don't play by the rules you're going to be sorry.
This is probably the kind of stability that was in Egypt before the revolution that ousted Mubarak ever since the 1950s. It was quiet and everyone enjoyed life and Egypt blossomed. But you try to put democracy in the hands of people who don't know how to handle it and in a lot of places in the Middle East they screw it up. They go backward. And they damage everything, the economy and the livelihood.
Anyway, I try to stay away from politics because I'm not a politician, I'm a tour operator. I'm glad I'm in this business because I love it. Even at my age, I'm 74, I don't like to think that one day I'll stop working because I love this business. Tour operation is part of my blood.
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