Numbers important for tourism growth

I have been engaging leaders in tourism public offices for so many years about the value of producing timely and accurate data for development purposes.

For many years I have asked and will not stop asking for Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) and Uganda Tourism Board (UTB) to publicly give quarterly tourism statistics.

I am so glad that UTB is undergoing restructuring. I hope that the people chosen to lead UTB will not only be able to listen but also desire to learn about how tourism works. This is because if you have never attracted a tourist into the country, you will never know how this whole process works. It has taken me more than 20 years of continuous learning and practicing but I still feel there is still a lot for me to learn.

I think one of the toughest things to do in Uganda is to find suitable candidates for top slots in any tourism related entity.

This includes private sector entities due to the limited pool of qualified, tested, exposed and experienced individuals in tourism.

With tourism being a fairly new industry to majority of Ugandans, we have not grown enough to have a large pool. One of the reasons we keep saying Uganda has earned $1.4b from tourism every single year and quoting 1.4m as the number of tourists every year for the past seven years is unreliable data.

This keeps those responsible for marketing Uganda lazy and yet they are meant to be under pressure, because Uganda needs those spending tourists to balance our import export deficits.

A good performance in tourism could help Uganda reduce in the borrowing game we are involved in. In our national budget reading this year, the second most important item will be debt repayment and therefore, anything that has the potential to earn us money such as tourism must be taken very seriously.

On January 7, the President of Kenya Uhuru Kenyatta alongside the Minister of Tourism Nagib Balala plus a big gathering of private sector players were launching and discussing Kenya’s tourism data of 2018.

The report released captures properly international tourists arrivals, domestic tourism performance and the tourism receipts which is the same as money earned. According to the report, Kenya had 2,029,206 international tourists arrivals in 2018 which earned them KShs157,386,151,000 and that is a 31.26 per cent growth in one year (Kenya earned KShs 119,900,000,000 in 2017).

Domestic tourists who are Kenyans travelling within the country had 3,974,243 bed nights. In other words, Kenyans occupied that number of commercial beds as they travelled within Kenya in 2018. Can you imagine how much food was eaten? Can you imagine how many jobs were created? On reading that report, I was most shocked about how many Ugandans actually went to Kenya as tourists and yes, I know Kenya has been doing lots of marketing here in Uganda.

Uganda was the third most important source of tourists to Kenya after the US and Tanzania. 225,157 Americans visited Kenya in 2018, 212,216 Tanzanians and Ugandans were 204,082 and those do not include guys who pick new cars from Mombasa. Others amongst the top seven were UK, India, China, and Germany in that order.

My hope is that guys at UTB read this report in depth to find out how they can refocus on Ugandan tourists. We can also discuss ways in which we can attract similar numbers from the US, UK, Germany, China etc.

If Kenya can do it, we can as well. When I sent this report to a few of my friends in tourism, the feeling was that Uganda was close to Kenya to which I said, no. We actually have better and more diverse tourism opportunities that need a more proactive marketing strategy.

In Uganda, we look at all our arrivals as tourists and Kenya uses a very refined process in the capturing of data for tourism purposes. There are two indicators which can show us how a country is doing well; seen in either international trade or tourism and those are airport numbers and chains of branded hotels.

Kenya for example has about five airports and Uganda has only one airport which handled about 1.62m passengers in 2018 with only 32 scheduled flights daily.

Kenya on the other hand had Jomo Kenyatta airport handle more than seven million passengers with 115 daily departures in 2017. Moi International Airport handled close to 1.4m passengers with 33 daily departures.

Uganda now has one five star international branded hotel, (Sheraton) plus a few regional brands such as Protea and Serena Hotels. Kenya has 68 branded chains plus 20 more new brands building hotels now. They will have 88 chains of hotels in 2021.
The new team at UTB may not have any experience in positioning of a country on an international stage but being able to listen and learn will help them.

The writer is an investment expert — [email protected]