As minister of tourism, Fadi Abboud has seen Lebanon through the heyday of visitor arrivals in 2010 to the more barren roads of 2011, as well as the change in government from last year to this. At the helm of one of the most underfunded ministries in the government while overseeing an industry accounting for nearly a quarter of the country’s gross domestic product, Abboud pulled no punches when laying out the challenges for tourism in Lebanon as he sat down for an exclusive one-on-one with Executive. E Following a fantastic 2010, how bad was 2011 for tourism? We broke all records in 2010. Some 2.2 million tourists visited Lebanon, with total tourist spending up to an estimated $8 billion. In 2011, I think we will be down by some 300,000 tourists, most of whom come by road. Because of what happened in Syria, we lost roughly some 100,000 Jordanians,
