More than 900 discounted vacation packages to Israel have been sold through the marketing website Groupon as the upswing in violence hits the lucrative tourism sector. Some 920 eight-day tour packages had been sold for $999 each on the website as of Thursday afternoon. The trips, marketed jointly with Israel’s Tourism Ministry, include flights, hotels…
Ask the State Department whether it is any safer now for Americans to travel to Iran, and the answer you’ll get will be unequivocally negative. The nuclear deal reached with Tehran, as a State Department makes clear, “does not alter the United States’ assessment of the risks of travel to Iran for U.S. citizens.” But…
A 20-year-old American college student died after falling during a hike on Masada in southern Israel. The woman, part of a group from Florida State University, fell some 26 feet off the historic mountain’s Snake Path on Tuesday afternoon while traveling with an unnamed organized group, according to reports. It took more than an hour…
Standing on the monumental hillside south of Bethlehem where King Herod the Great was buried more than 2,000 years ago, Fadi Kattan stretches out his arm to point out the nearby Israeli settlements of Tekoa and Nokdim. “That’s part of the problem,” says Kattan, a Palestinian tourism expert, explaining the obstacles hindering the growth of…
(JTA) — Eilat — located on Israel’s southern tip, hundreds of miles and a metaphorical world away from the busy streets of Tel Aviv and the tense political climate of Jerusalem — is known as a destination with swanky hotels, swimming, snorkeling and suntanning. But residents of the city say that behind the promenade, a…
Well, here’s something you don’t see every day. The Israeli Embassy in Tokyo has launched an anime web series to encourage Japanese tourists to visit the Holy Land — and it’s kind of amazing. “Israel, Like!” is an unusual blend of hasbara and manga — I hereby dub it “hasbaranga” — featuring two Japanese sisters,…
Israel’s August tourist numbers took a sharp downturn from the previous year’s figures. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, 182,000 visitor entries were recorded for the month in Israel, down 36 percent from August 2013. Of the visitor entries, 164,000 were tourists staying more than one night, 32 percent less than August a year…
Tourism to Israel, badly damaged by rocket fire from Gaza during an Israeli offensive against Islamist militants in the enclave, should bounce back later in the year, Tourism Minister Uzi Landau said on Tuesday. More than 3.5 million visitors came to Israel in 2013, pumping some 40 billion shekels ($12 billion) into the economy and…
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