br Conclusion br Acknowledgements We would like

Conclusion
Acknowledgements We would like to thanks the editors and the anonymous referees of the journal for constructive comments and suggestions, which have significantly helped to improve the contents of the paper. Furthermore, special thanks to Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS) Vot No. 5524716 sponsored by Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education and Universiti Putra Malaysia Grant IPM Vot No. 9473700 sponsored by Universiti Putra Malaysia as an organizations that funded my research. The usual caveats apply.
1. Introduction The tourism and hospitality industry is the most diverse and vibrant economic activities. It represents one of the largest market HMBA Linker in Mediterranean (MED) countries (Thulemark, Lundmark & Heldt-Cassel, 2014). The industry was built on active products and service innovators and frequently set trends that developed different brands. The brands’ popularities were developed so that customers could identify them with their particular values. The portfolio of this industry includes different hotels, companies, chain operators and small medium enterprises (SMEs). In south MED social or political challenges arena had negative consequences on the tourism industry. The turmoil that occurred in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia whether on the social or the political arena had negative cost on almost all aspects of the economy. The tourism sector in particular suffered huge losses in the years that followed the turbulence (El-Katiri, 2014). The unprecedented circumstances have driven the tourism sector to a continuous decline on the sector׳s profitability. The drop in returns drove hotels to adopt short tactical strategies that could help in at least reaching the breakeven point. Among the adopted practices many rely on discounting advertising campaigns in national newspapers, downsizing in the labor force, and cutting the cost of operation are amongst the adopted practices. Applying these practices didn’t provide any clearly state fruitful results. Here appears the importance of this study. This study sheds light on, how embraced management practices in Egypt related to the employed marketing mix have led to maintain occupancy rates of hospitality properties at its safe boundaries.
2. The hospitality industry in Egypt Tourism is considered one of the most important sources of income for Egypt, along with the Suez Canal revenues and remittances from Egyptians living abroad. However, this sector been hammered since the uprising and what is known as Arab Spring in 2011. The existing capacity of hotels was increasing from 132.1 to 223.1 thousand rooms during the period from 2002 till 2010 representing 69% growth rate in the same period. But after 2011 the existing capacity dropped by around 18.3% in comparison to 2010, and it continues to decrease between 2013 till 2014 by 7.6%, see Fig. 1. Hotel capacity is classified to different categories according to the ministry of tourism. Fig. 2 shows theses categories of hotels according to their classification. According to MOT 2015 report, it can be noted that floating hotels represent 20% of the total hotel capacities, while hotel and tourist village rooms, on land, represent the other 80% of room capacity. While the three-star hotel category, both floating and land properties represent 26% of total hospitality property population. Moreover, the four-star category represent only 21% and the five-star category fills 15% of Egypt׳s room capacity (the five star properties are mostly run by international chains). The majority of hotels are based in the areas of the Red Sea and Saini and they represent 73.7% of the total hospitality property capacity in Egypt, see Table 1. Red sea and Sinai ranked the first in the number of the hotel capacity, followed by greater Cairo that represent 14.5% of the total hotels, while in Luxor and Aswan only 3.7%, see Fig. 3. This reflects that the reasons of the great; loss according to the sites. Further indicators concerning the average occupancy percentage of hotels in Egypt dropped to an average of 50% in 2013 precisely after the Arab Spring׳s political unrest. However, in 2014, the occupancy percentage of the Egyptian hotels increased to 55% particularly in the hotels of South Sinai while in Hurghada and some other Red Sea it increased to 67%. Fig. 4 shows the occupancy of hotels in the major tourist cities in Egypt in 2013 and 2014.