The number of international visitors to Iran has surged for the past two calendar years despite a series of sanctions imposed by the United States that have sought to isolate the country at the global level.
Iranian Vice President Es'haq Jahangiri said on Monday that tourism has boomed since March 2018 when Washington was preparing to impose its unilateral sanctions on Iran.
He said tourist arrivals into the country had surged by 30 percent each year for the past two years to reach a total of seven million visitors annually.
“The Americans had thought that through imposing oppressive sanctions against the Iranian nation, they would impede the travel of foreign visitors into our country,” said Jahangiri while visiting tourism facilities in the southern Iranian port city of Bushehr.
The senior government official admitted, however, that total arrivals could have hit a record of 10 million people at the end of this year in March 2020 if the sanctions had not been enforced.
Tourism has become a key sector for the Iranian economy since the sanctions were enacted in May last year.
Easing visa requirements and other restrictions, the government has sought more arrivals of tourists, especially from East Asian countries, as it looks for alternative sources of hard currency that could compensate for losses suffered in direct sale of oil.
Iran’s main department on tourism was upgraded to the rank of a ministry earlier this year to facilitate the policy-making in the sector and allow more investment attraction.
Authorities expect a total of seven million tourists to arrive in Iran until March, an increase of 42 percent year-on-year compared to 2016 when the country had just been relieved of international sanctions on its nuclear program.