Afghanistan a surprise best-seller destination for British travel agency

A UK-based travel agency says their tours to Afghanistan have become their best-seller despite the British Foreign Office’s warning that travel to the country is “extremely dangerous”.

Speaking to The Independent, Dylan Harris, founder of Lupine Travel, said: “It’s the last place I expected to sell so well.”

Harris said Afghanistan has become their most popular destination and that “it’s actually safer to travel there now than it was before.”

He said: “Last month we put three trips on sale for next year. They sold out immediately.

“Now we’ve got eight trips next year and they’ve all completely sold out.

“There was always demand for it prior to the Taliban [takeover], but I think a lot of people were worried about safety. Whereas now people aren’t as concerned about the safety issue.

“The only thing: there’s a lot more red tape than there used to be. So every time we move from one city to the next, it’s a case of getting all the paperwork checked out.”

Officials from the Ministry of Information and Culture say that a large number of foreign tourists have visited Afghanistan in the past two years.

Mohammad Nabi, head of the tourism department of the Balkh Department of Information and Culture, says: “Tourists from different countries have visited Afghanistan and were very happy with their visit and the security situation in Afghanistan.”

Abdul Jabbar Noorzai, head of Herat Museum’s archive department, says: “In the past nine months, about 9,223 domestic and foreign tourists, as well as students from public and private schools, visited Herat Museum.”