The Tourism Council of Zambia (TCZ) is concerned that Zambia continues to be one of the most expensive tourist destinations in Africa.
TCZ board chairman Jacob Simwanza says this has made the country to continue losing
a number of foreign tourists.
Mr Simwanza says although the tourism industry ranks second to agriculture, Zambia
has not fully benefited from the industry sector.
He was speaking in Lusaka last night during the official launch of the Hotel Express Card (HEC) by a local company, JFK Investments Limited.
The HEC is a facility that would enable lodges and hotels to charge half of the given room rates.
Mr Simwanza cited the year 2005 in which the tourism sector posted a dividend of US$ 720 billion worldwide out of which only two percent was credited to Africa with South Africa taking the lion’s share.
The TCZ board chairman noted that this gloomy picture could be reversed if Africa’s
tourism products were well packaged and marketed to the international community.
He urged JFK Investments Limited to consider joining the TCZ so that many more lodges, motels and hotels also benefit from the HEC facility.
So far the Intercontinental Hotel, Zambezi Sun hotel, Livingstone Royal hotel and
Chrisma hotel are the only hotels that are offering a fifty percent less of their room rates.
And the company’s Managing Director Febby Kasanga encouraged local companies to
consider taking advantage of the HEC.
Mrs Kasanga said companies and individuals should take advantage of the HEC as it
has a number of benefits.
ZANIS
How can anyone justify £8000 for me to bring my wife to Zambia, spend 2 nights in Pamodzi and 10 nights in safari park???..I could hire a whole secluded island in the Maldives for that amount…greed…pure greed!!!
This is really crazy! So many tourists would love to visit Zambia, but the expenses are just too high for a country like Zambia. Hotels are more expensive compared to several hotels in Europe? Why? The ministry should explain this. I guess the other cause is also that we have allowed so many foreign investors to manage hotels. We are loosing more.
OJ, it’s not about allowing foreign investors managing the businesses. The running costs of just operating a business in Zambia are just too high, even Zambian owned companies are finding it difficult. Off 11 million people, only 2 million are in employment, of that only 100,000 are in formal employment. The govt just has no money and they have to squeeze the little that people are making, you know what happenings when ZRA is on you. People in Zambia still want organisations to be run by the Govt, due to laziness, and these are the results.
No Employment, no revenue for govt,high operating costs.
Kayata, while I agree that smallness is costly, your figures are flatly wrong. Formal sector employment is over five times your figures, and uneployment rate is in the 30s.
The tax system in Zambia needs to be restructred but also the spending side of govt. Until recently, we havent done a good job of improving agriculture, mining and poverty, as this is where the economic linkages to feed into a robust public revenue base should come from.
Costs of production will come down once these fundamentals are dealt with. Anyone offering an adminstrative based intervention is making economically unsound analysis.