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Kenya Tourism Report Q4 2011
Business Monitor International, Sep 2011, Pages: 45
Business Monitor International's Kenya Tourism Report provides industry professionals and strategists, corporate analysts, tourism associations, government departments and regulatory bodies with independent forecasts and competitive intelligence on Kenya's tourism industry.
2010 A Positive Year For Tourism
Kenya saw steady growth in tourist arrival numbers during 2010, with a total of 1,095,945 arrivals over the year according to information from the Ministry of Tourism. This performance marked a 3.3% increase on the 1,061,200 tourists who visited Kenya in 2009. Once business travellers, visitors in transit and other visitors are taken into consideration, this sees overall arrivals reach around 1,800,000 for the year, putting 2010 on a par with the previous record of 1,816,800 visitors recorded in 2007. Tourism revenues totalled KES73.68bn for the year, up by 18% year on year (y-o-y) in local currency terms. This only equates to US$929mn, as the shilling continues to weaken on international currency markets. That said, ongoing shilling weakness will make Kenya an increasingly cheap destination for foreign tourists, which may benefit the country moving forward.
Looking at trends so far in 2011, Bloomberg reported on comments made by Tourism Minister Najib Balala at the end of June where he stated that the number of visitors had increased by 16% y-o-y over the first four months, to reach 390,148. Given this strong start to the year, BMI is currently forecasting a 20% increase in tourist numbers (in line with government forecasts) for the current year.
BMI believes that Kenya can welcome a total of 1,315,000 tourist visitors in 2011, spending an estimated US$1.05bn. Over the remainder of their forecast period to 2015, BMI believe that arrivals and tourism revenues will continue to grow, with tourist arrivals standing at over 1.63mn by 2015 and tourism revenues back up to around the US$1.4bn mark.
Hotel Sector Developing
In recent years, there has been a spate of high-end openings in Nairobi, including the 156-room Sankara, the 134-room Ole Sereni and the 162-room Crowne Plaza. These hotels will soon be joined by a Sofitel and a Radisson Blu property. BMI believes that the arrival of this significant number of high-end properties should do much to boost average room revenue rates for Kenya as a whole and aid the development of the wider hospitality sector.
In March 2011, the Ministry of Tourism announced that it would be carrying out a major hotel reclassification process across the country, in an effort to improve standards for visiting tourists. The process was last carried out in 2000 and was marred by allegations of bribery.
However, by May 2011 the All Africa website was reporting that a shortage of assessors, plus the fact that many hotels are currently closed for renovation works, had forced the Ministry of Tourism to suspend the process temporarily. According to the Kenya Hotel Keepers and Caterers Association, there are over 5,000 hotels in Kenya and only 19 assessors are available for the classification and rating.
If carried out properly, BMI believes that the development of a new national classification system will be a great help to the evolution of the Kenyan hospitality industry, allowing tourists to be better informed about the standard of accommodation available across the country.
Airline Industry Expanding
In recent years, there has been a steady increase in the number of visitors travelling to Kenya by air, with passenger numbers (arrivals, departures and transit) passing through Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi rising by 8% y-o-y in 2010, to reach 5.49mn. Passengers passing through Moi International Airport (MIA) in Mombasa also rose, by 14.1% y-o-y to reach 1.27mn. The other seven airports operated by the Kenya Airport Authority (KAA) saw passenger numbers of 760,000, making for total passengers handled by KAA of 7.52mn in 2010. In terms of arrivals alone, a total of 1.23mn travellers arrived in Kenya over 2010, making up over half of all visitor arrivals. Rising visitor numbers have led to KAA seeking funding to carry out the modernisation of JKIA, which is ongoing.
In July 2011, Gulf Air launched services to JKIA, making it the 38th scheduled passenger airline to serve the airport according to a KAA press release. One month earlier, KAA announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding with South Korean airport operator Korea Airports Corporation, which will allow for the transfer of competences and training methods between the two bodies.
Rounding out this propitious backdrop, passenger numbers on Kenya Airways were up 13.5% for the first quarter of 2011 against the same quarter in 2010 (which itself was much improved over both 2008 and 2009). Alongside growth in discount airline passenger numbers, the country’s aviation industry is more optimistic than it has been in some years.
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