Morocco plans to expand its hotel capacity by 60 000 beds, equal to about a fifth of its current total, by the time the country co-hosts \u200bthe 2030 World Cup, its tourism minister said.<\/p>\n
The North African country \u200cis riding a wave of publicity from its quarter-final run in the latest World Cup after becoming the first African and Arab side to reach the semi-finals in Qatar four years ago.<\/p>\n
Officials \u200bwant to leverage the renewed attention into lasting gains for the country’s \u200btourism industry, which employs hundreds of thousands of Moroccans and contributes about 7% \u2060of gross domestic product.<\/p>\n
“We see the 2030 FIFA World Cup as an accelerator, \u200bnot an end in itself,” Tourism Minister Fatim-Zahra Ammor told Reuters.<\/em><\/p>\n The government is investing \u200bmore than 190 billion dirhams (about $20 billion) to build and expand rail, road, airports, stadiums and other urban infrastructure ahead of the 2030 tournament, where Morocco is one of three main co-hosts with Portugal \u200band Spain.<\/p>\n The number of matches each of them will host has yet to \u200bbe decided.<\/p>\n Morocco has already added 45 000 hotel beds over the past four years, bringing \u200cthe \u2060current total to a little over 300,000, official data shows.<\/p>\n The North African country welcomed nearly 20 million tourists last year, making it the most visited destination in Africa. It aims to attract 26 million visitors by 2030.<\/p>\n \u2014Reuters\u2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":34068,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"news-type":[44],"class_list":["post-40063","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-finance","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"The number of matches each of them will host has yet to \u200bbe decided.","published_date":"","news_description":"The number of matches each of them will host has yet to \u200bbe decided.","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/40063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/40063\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40065,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/40063\/revisions\/40065"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=40063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}