CAIRO, Oct 9 (AFP) - The string of deadly bombings at popular resorts on the Red Sea coast of Egypt's Sinai peninsula has dealt a fresh blow to the country's tourism industry, just as it recovered from a massacre in Luxor seven years ago.
Britain, Germany and the United States have already told their citizens to avoid Sinai, while thousands of Israeli tourists poured out of Egypt in the immediate aftermath of the bombing.
And Israeli officials have advised their nationals not to return.
Three explosions late Thursday demolished part of a luxury hotel in Taba, just across the Israeli border, and targeted backpacker resorts further south in Nuweiba, halfway to the international tourist centre of Sharm El-Sheikh.
Most of the 33 dead discovered so far were Israelis.
Egyptian tour operators told AFP they anticipated some cancellations but hoped the impact of the bombings would be short lived.
South Sinai's governor, General Mustapha Afifi, said that "apart from departing Israelis we have not yet had any cancellations."
But Israeli tourist numbers are important to Sinai, with an estimated 30,000 having crossed into Egypt during this week's Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
The Israeli exodus has since left Sinai beach camps deserted, with no immediate prospect of a return.
Beach huts that constitute dozens of low-budget resorts on the Red Sea coast as well as pricier hotels in Taba were reportedly deserted on Saturday.
The Taba Hilton's 431 rooms were fully occupied when a car laden with explosives drove into the lobby and exploded.
Around 850 of the hotel's 900 guests were Israeli, with potential guests reportedly being turned away for lack of a room before the bombings.
Tourism is Egypt's main source of foreign currency, amounting to around four billion dollars a year.
And while the industry has suffered from a number of blows in the past few years, it has recovered well each time.
August saw a record number of tourists visiting the land of the pharaohs, after the industry was most recently hit by fallout from the US-led war in Iraq in March-April 2003 and the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States.
But the toughest blow came following an Islamic militant attack that killed 58 tourists in Luxor in 1997.
Egypt managed to limit the fallout from that by heavily promoting Sinai's Sharm el-Sheikh resort as an alternative to upper Egypt's Luxor. This time, however, there is no obvious alternative.
Prior to the Sinai attacks, Egyptian authorities were predicting eight million tourist coming for longer-than-ever stays in 2004.
More than five million foreign tourists visited Egypt in 2002, with over a million Italians coming to stay in the first eight months of this year alone.
Two Italian sisters were reported missing in the ruins of the Taba hotel.
Tourism Minister Ahmed al-Maghrabi has said he wants to increase the country's 167,000 hotel beds nationwide by 100,000 over the next 10 years.
But the foreign investment necessary to achieve that goal may be difficult to find following Thursday's attacks.
Mahgrabi has also said he wants to "open up new destinations" outside of upper Egypt and the Red Sea, by developing the Mediterranean coast west of Alexandria in particular and desert tourism around oases such as Siwa, near the Libyan border.