Business Daily (Nairobi)
Dominique Patton
17 January 2008
Chinese tourists were set to pack Kenyan national parks next month, swapping traditional lion dances and New Year's firework displays for sights of real, wild animals.
But 80 per cent of bookings have been cancelled and Henry Yim, Kenya Tourist Board's marketing manager in Hong Kong, is fearful for this small but fast-growing market.
"The Chinese New Year season is almost destroyed," he told the Business Daily. "We're now back to square one."
Kenya has been attracting growing numbers of Chinese tourists, attracted to the beauty of its wildlife and wide open spaces, a sharp contrast to the heavily urbanised, populated landscapes in China. Chinese arrivals during the first nine months of 2007 were already up 28 per cent on the prior year, and for the first quarter of 2008, bookings were up by at least 200 per cent.
Leading up to Christmas local tour operators had been struggling to get seats on flights to Kenya for the Chinese New Year festival beginning the first week of February.
Now there are likely to be many empty hotel rooms and lodges. China is a 'sensitive' market, says Mr Yim, with many tourists visiting Africa for the first time and typically nervous of security problems.
Chinese tourists on multi-destination trips now plan to bypass Kenya and extend their stay in other countries like South Africa and Egypt. "It's going to deeply hurt the image of Kenya," he said.
KTB had expected to report China visitor numbers of around 20,000 for 2008, up from an estimated 18,000 last year, but the year is going to be much tougher than expected.
Kenya's Sh60 billion tourism industry is seeing cancellations from around the world, following outbreaks of violence in the country in response to the December 27 election. Travel advisories from the British and US governments as well as China and numerous other countries are warning travellers not to visit Kenya, cutting off the normally heavy flow of inbound tourists.
China is a much smaller market than the UK and US, which supplied Kenya with some 300,000 and 80,000 visitors respectively last year. But it is an important emerging market, particularly as incomes rise and a new middle class swells. Appreciation of the Chinese currency against the dollar is also boosting outbound travel and Chinese travellers were expected to take up some of the slack left by a downturn in the US economy.
Chinese New Year is the most important of the country's three week-long national holidays each year and while it has traditionally been celebrated among family at home, those with higher incomes are now eager to use the time for travelling abroad.
Most people aspire to visit Thailand, Malaysia or even Europe or the US. But for the lucky few who have already ticked these destinations off their list, Africa is more exotic and still virgin territory.
Trips to the continent are rising on the back of growing business ties with China. "Business travellers still account for about 60 per cent of those travelling to Nairobi but leisure is growing in importance," says Mr Yim.
Improved accessibility is also expected to boost the numbers of inbound tourists from China. Kenya Airways had been planning to add extra flights to Nairobi from both Guangzhou, the southern China business hub, and Hong Kong within the first quarter of 2008, said marketing manager Lily Tang. There will be 10 daily flights, up from seven currently from both destinations.
It is not now known whether this will go ahead.KTB is hoping that the situation will stabilise in coming months. "There are mixed messages coming through in the local media," says Mr Yim. "Many reports say that Kenya has been a relatively safe and stable country and an exception in the area for several decades."
Zhang Bin, general manager of the Beijing office of specialist tour operator Sino-Africa Safari, says his firm has already seen a recovery in bookings since January 11 after half of its bookings were cancelled in the two weeks prior to that.
"We'll still need one or two months for our revenue to return to normal."
The next important holiday season in China is in May but the national holiday during the first week of that month has been reduced this year, raising questions about how many people will book long-haul trips. In 2006, 34.5 million Chinese travelled abroad.
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