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Issue 00435 |
September 9 - 15, 2006 |
issn 0856 - 9135 |
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Front Page 2 |
Tourists influx outstrips boarding facilities By Valentine Marc Nkwame With less than two years left before Arusha hosts the prestigious International Tourism Conference which is slated for May 2008, the northern zone tourism circuit is crippled by lack of enough hotels. Both tourism and hospitality industry stakeholders have expressed concern through their organization, the Tanzania Association of Tour Operators, that is high time something is done to curb the shortage of quality hotels in the locality. Shortage of quality hotels is being experienced at time when the circuit’s popularity for both Safari and Conference tourism is peaking. The hotel facilities in the Northern zone’s circuit are reported to be overwhelmed by large numbers of tourists to the extent that some of the foreign visitors are now compelled to either keep being shifted from one Hotel to another or forced to commute long distances from other options away from the National parks. “Hotels are mushrooming up in Dar-es-salaam with quite a few of them being built here, even though Arusha needs these facilities more than Dar does.” said Mustafa Akonaay the TATO executive secretary, adding that this crucial fact may in future deviate the local tourists traffic towards the Coastal circuit, where they will be assured of both the quality and availability of accommodation. The visitors touring the Northern Zone attractions’ account for over 80 percent of the total International tourists traffic, which heads to Tanzania every year. More than 700,000 tourists visited the country last year and the trend, according to the Tanzania Tourist Board (TTB) has been increasing for about 12 percent for the past five years. With that in mind, at least 800,000 tourists will have visited the country by December 2006 and out of those, over 640,000 would have sampled the northern zone-based tourism attractions, before the end of this year. The majority of international tourists visiting Tanzania are from Europe, North America and Canada. The current bustling Tourism season picked up during the third week of June and is expected to go on until Mid-September, another season is likely to again start by Mid-October and this one will go on until the last week of March 2007 when the heavy rains spell (Masika) starts. The "Tourism Master Plan - Strategy & Actions," which was released by the Tanzanian Ministry of Natural resources and Tourism in 2002, reveals that in that year (2002) there was a total of 1020 rooms, in local hotels and lodges, 630 rooms in the then available Tented Camps and a further 400 rooms in restaurants (premises), throughout the country. On the other hand "The 2001 Tanzania Tourism Sector survey" indicated that in both Arusha and Kilimanjaro, there were 46 hotels, 27 lodges, 5 hostels, 2 tented camps, 4 campsites and other 4 un-classified facilities all totaling to 87. Akonaay says his association had at the moment no official record update of local hotel facilities or their capacity, adding that the Ministry of Tourism was however conducting a special ‘inventory’ of all accommodation in the local tourism circuits and that the position will be clear after this exercise. .
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