When I this year visited Southern and East Africa I regularly read the local newspapers in Tanzania and Kenya. They were very much discussing the issue: ”Why don’t the tourists come here any longer, how do we get more tourists to our countries”. What stroke me was the fact that they I always missed the essential point. They blamed lack of promotion, visa fees (especially the new US$ 50.- visa in Kenya), the high air port taxes in Nairobi &c.&c. Never did they discuss the two key issues: Safety and value for money.
Safety may not be the biggest problem in Tanzania, although there are pirates in the port of Dar-es-Salaam, you can’t walk along the beaches in the city and there were several reports in the daily papers about bus robberies in Central and Northern Tanzania. But safety is surely a problem in Kenya, especially in Nairobi, where you cannot walk on the ”wrong” side of the Moi Avenue (Where the bus station is), you have to expect robberies anywhere in the cities and the daily papers in Kenya every day were full of reports of hijackings in Nairobi, armed robberies with AK47 in Nairobi and road robberies, where a donkey was chased out in front of cars in the dusk and the accident victims were robbed afterwards.
Value for money is another big problem in East Africa. With exceptions, like the Durban Hotel in Dar-es-Salaam, New Mwanza Hotel in Mwanza, Mazson´s Hotel in Zanzibar and Oceanic Hotel in Mombasa, hotel rooms are very much over-priced in the two countries as is transportation in Tanzania, if you are an overseas foreigner. In most European cities you can get a decent hotel room in a small hotel for about US$ 45.-. In Nairobi the Hotel Ambassadeur charged that amount too, but there the lift (elevator) didn’t work properly, the hotel reception had no map of Nairobi and couldn’t tell you anything about the city and the hotel had no proper restaurant of its own. The Peacock Hotel in Dar-es-Salaam charged US$ 70.- for a single room that wasn’t worth half of it and their restaurant was a catastrophe. The one and a half hour high speed boat ride from Dar-es-Salaam to Zanzibar was US$ 40.-. In Scandinavia a similar ride would have been US$ 15.-. Not to speak about ”tours”, ”excursions” and ”safaris”. US$ 60.- for a guided old town tour in Mombasa (and that old town is not big) is just one crazy example.
The strange thing about Africa, comparing to other Continents, where the poorer the country is the lower the prices are, is that here the poorer the country is, the higher are the prices. In Maputo a hotel room at the Avenida Hotel was US$ 120.-. You get better standard for one third of that in South Africa. The day the Europeans discover what value for money you get in South Africa when it comes to food and lodging, East Africa Tourism can close down.
Finally, Africans have to learn that Europeans are not Americans. A lot of Americans work and struggle an entire lifetime, nearly without having vacation, and then they have 3 or 4 million US dollars on a bank account when they are 55 or 60. To them it’s OK to fly in to Africa, go on safaris at US$ 500.-/night/person, live at International five stars hotels at US$ 150.-/night and then fly out again. To a European 3 or 4 million dollars on a bank account is ridiculous fantasy. Most Europeans never even have 100 000.- US$ on a bank account. But Europeans have pretty long vacations and can travel all their life. But just because we have a much higher living standard than many Africans can dream of and use money on travelling, which obviously is absurd to a lot of Africans, that doesn’t mean that we are willing to pay ridiculous overprices for low or mediocre delivery.
The main problem for East African Tourism is not lack of promotion, but tourists coming home from East Africa, telling what they’ve experienced. (I am now fully aware of that I’m generalising to a very high degree, but the point was to focus on the key words safety and value for money.)
where Africa comes to you..
