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Issue 00549 |
Jan 10 - 16, 2009 |
issn 0856 - 9135 |
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Front Page 3 |
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Six months of tourism blues By Staff Reporter There will be six months of a tourism lull. Local tour operators have reported postponement of potential visitors to Tanzania this season. “But most tourists have not yet cancelled their programs, they simply postponed their trips waiting for the world’s economic situation to stabilize,” Mustafa Akonaay the Executive Officer of the Tanzania Association of Tour Operators, explained. But tourists coming from the UK and USA have mostly called off their programs. Europe and America were the hardest hit areas when the global economy crisis blanketed the world as from October last year. According to TATO, Arusha and other tour destinations in Northern Tanzania will experience six-months of tourism blues starting this January all the way to June when hopefully foreign visitors may decide to resume their visits to local attractions. Arusha, the gateway to Northern circuit usually gets over 80 percent of all Tanzania bound tourists. The Executive was far from being optimistic, pointing out that there was still no guarantee that even in June the global financial crunch would have ceased to bite and should things remain the same or get worse, then chances are the country will plunge into one full year of ‘no serious tourism activities!’ The grounding of the National carrier, Air Tanzania last December also meant that the country is now at the mercy of foreign operated flights and thus powerless to control either the fares or route frequencies to local destinations. “Air transport accounts for 60 percent of total tourism package and in such bad times countries with own airlines can easily reduce flight costs to encourage tourists to travel to local destinations but now Tanzania’s ailing National carrier has been banned from flying, which means the only way visitors can come to Tanzania is to rely on foreign carriers,” stated the TATO official. And there have been few if any inquiries from potential tourists and even fewer confirmations while the previously ‘confirmed’ journeys have been postponed. “The mid and low income groups of tourists seem to be hardest hit by the recession and these are the people who normally tour local destinations in East Africa,” stated Akonaay. Some papers reported ‘cry-wolf’ speculations of cancelled visits last year but according to TATO Arusha never suffered such problems throughout last year, adding that tourists were still coming in large numbers up to mid December 2008. “The industry will suffer for the first time since the recent financial crunch, this year,” stated TATO. Fewer visitors may be heading this way this year but even these have been demanding huge discounts and have also cut short the duration of their stay. Local tour operators are now forced to charge old rates just to keep the business alive. Tour companies and agents, whose clients come from the United States and United Kingdom, according to recent TATO inquiries, have been experiencing cancellations of between 30 and 60 percent and these affects the period between January and June 2009. The rest have their journeys postponed some to as long as 12 months. An average of 700,000 tourists visit Tanzania annually, with over 80 percent of this figure heading to the Northern circuit to sample well known attractions such as Ngorongoro Crater, Serengeti National Park and Mount Kilimanjaro among others.
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