In the coming years, East Africa’s hospitality and tourism sectors will record a positive growth, said Wayne Troughton, CEO of specialist global hospitality and tourism consultancy, HTI Consulting.

Over the past few years, key projects have been implemented in East Africa to raise year-to-year tourism revenues from $7 billion to $16 billion, by 2020. “This indicates a positive outlook for the hospitality and tourism sector in the region, with a number of new projects and international brand entrants lined-up for the coming years,” said Troughton. He added that “exploiting the region’s wealth of natural resources” will play a major role “in reducing investment risk and boosting East African tourism and hotel industries”, news website travelwires.com reports.

Truly, many international hotel brands have been very active in East Africa. This includes the world’s largest operator Marriott which is building in Nairobi (Kenya) a $98.8 million hotel and acquiring two properties in Uganda. Also, in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, these brands have announced plans to add respectively 2,956, 1,397 and 1,491 rooms to the nations’ current capacity.

Expansion of tourism and hospitality in the region is fostered by various factors such as the reduction of trade barriers, improved infrastructural links and greater integration. It is in fact based on these that BMI Research said “East Africa is expected to deliver the strongest real GDP growth in Sub-Saharan Africa over the next decade”. A performance which is mostly likely to be achieved after EAC passport (proposed for January 2017) is effective as it will boost trade, growth and freer movement of people in the region.

It should be highlighted that though East Africa’s hospitality and tourism industry is expected to boom, the region for now still lags behind West Africa which has twice its number of upcoming hotels. In the region, Nigeria leads with more than 8,500 rooms in 51 planned hotels, more than East and Central Africa combined.

Schadrac Akinocho