Corporate News
Tourists at the Maasai Mara Game Reserve. The tourism industry in Kenya
and Tanzania has been affected by the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP
By REUTERS
In Summary
- Galling to some is that no east African nation has had a single case of the Ebola virus, which has killed about 5,000 people, the vast majority in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea on the opposite side of the continent.
- Several east African nations have imposed restrictions on travellers coming from afflicted areas.
The Serengeti and Maasai Mara national parks are
further from the Ebola outbreak than much of Europe, which supplies the
tourists; but you’d hardly guess that from the slump in bookings.
In Tanzania and Kenya, tour operators say tented camps and
luxury lodges are surviving on visitors who have not yet written off the
whole continent because of an outbreak that struck 5,000 kilometres
away.
“The probability of dying from a tree falling on
your head is probably higher than going on a safari in the Serengeti
and catching Ebola,” said John Corse of Nomad Tanzania, one of whose
camps overlooks plains where wildebeest make the annual great migration,
often described as a natural Wonder of the World.
Tanzania – which relies heavily on tourist dollars
from visits to game reserves, Mount Kilimanjaro or Indian Ocean beaches –
was aiming for a record year to top the more than one million visitors
who came in 2013. That now looks a pipedream.
The Hotels Association of Tanzania, representing
195 sites nationwide, said business is down 30 to 40 per cent on the
year and advanced bookings, mostly for 2015, are 50 per cent lower.
Next door Kenya has been hurt too. Its tourism
industry was already reeling from a spate of attacks by Islamists,
including last year’s attack on the upscale Westgate mall and more
recent incidents at the Coast.
Ebola has added to the pain, making dollars more scarce in the foreign exchange market and weakening the shilling.
Safaris are vital to both nations because they tend
to draw wealthier visitors, ready to splash out on luxuries like
sundowners after a game drive.
“A safari holiday behaves like a form of luxury
goods: people consume more of it when they’re feeling safe and wealthy,”
said Corse, whose packages combining a week or so in the bush followed
by a few days on Zanzibar’s beaches cost $8,000 to $15,000
(Sh700,000-Sh1.3 million) a person.
Particularly galling to some is that no east
African nation has had a single case of the Ebola virus, which has
killed about 5,000 people, the vast majority in Liberia, Sierra Leone
and Guinea on the opposite side of the continent.
The US and Spain, meanwhile, have had cases of
infection on their soil and also deaths from the disease. Madrid stands
less than 4,000 km from Liberia’s capital Monrovia, a shorter distance
than the game reserves of Kenya and Tanzania.
Several east African nations have imposed restrictions on travellers coming from afflicted areas.
Kenya Airways
halted flights in August to Monrovia and Freetown after Kenya was
declared a “high-risk” zone because Nairobi is one of Africa’s transport
hubs. Some European airlines still fly to afflicted nations of West
Africa.
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