Nairobi-Kenya
Tourism officials from the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) are expected to launch the first steps towards creating a borderless tourism market as part of building sustainable tourism industry across the 19 member countries.
Officials drawn from all COMESA member countries meeting in Nairobi since Wednesday for a 2-day brainstorming conference will agree on developing a common selling point for regional tourism market.
The delegates are also expected to come up with innovative and cheaper tourism products to promote domestic tourism and coming up with modalities of improving the regional tourism image at the international arena.
“The tourism offerings within COMESA are unique and diverse offering a huge tourism potential that we should exploit. As we do other things, we should also come up with modalities of correcting the bad image perception on the region created by the international media,” Tourism Minister Danson Mwazo said.
A borderless tourism market is part of integration efforts currently being undertaken within COMESA, an already free trade area that is set to link up with the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) and the East Africa Community (EAC) by mid-2014 to create Africa’s largest free trade area.
Officials are expected to come up with a common strategy for launching a borderless tourism market on Thursday when the conference ends.Issues that came up for discussion on the first day of the conference include proposal to review air travel costs within the region and increase of air traffic within major cities as lack of that currently makes it very expensive to travel by air.
For instance, flying from Kenyan capital Nairobi to Burundian capital Bujumbura costs an estimated 725 U.S. dollars by air, nearly the same cost of travelling from Nairobi to London and back.
Officials also agreed there is need by respective tourism markets to give focus to cultural preservation to ensure sustainability of tourism markets and as part of diversifying tourism markets available in the region.
For instance, while a country like Tanzania is stronger on game and beach tourism, Swaziland is stronger in cultural tourism and therefore complements the regional tourism offerings.
Creating a borderless market is also the best way of encouraging domestic tourism to balance with the current over dependence on tourists from Western countries.
African economies are seen as growing and factors like new mineral resource discoveries and growing service industries have been tipped as growth drivers of the future that will create adequate middle class with disposable income to travel within the region.
The conference in Kenya is the first in the series of COMESA Sustainable Tourism Development Forum. The Nairobi conference will analyse the regional diagnostic study of COMESA’s 19 Member States, whose aim was to come up with a framework for regional approaches that can be undertaken by both the public and private sector stakeholders to promote a more competitive, investor friendly, sustainable tourism sector in the region.
COMESA delegates said that the framework addresses issues such as putting in place a regional policy and strategy that defines tourism in the region, promotes the relaxation of visa requirements for tourists, packages and brands tourism, investment in infrastructure for tourism development.
Besides, they have plans to upgrades the sector to meet regional and global standards, promotes investment in key areas of tourism such as hospitality and catering, addresses supply side constraints in the hotel industry, and exploits the quick benefits of E-Tourism, among others.
According to the COMESA Secretariat that organised the conference here, tourism is the fastest developing enterprise in Africa and one of the continent’s major investment opportunities, standing at 6 percent growth rate per year. Africa receives 4.8 percent of all tourist arrivals in the world. (Xinhua)
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