The number of investments in hotel and tourism sector of Africa has been growing says, a research. Africa is seeing a significant growth in international air travellers – arrivals were up 10.3% between September 2016 and January this year.
Europe remained the leading source market with a 47.3% share, while Asia Pacific was the fastest growing, up 21.7%. The encouraging figures for the continent’s economy are released today by ForwardKeys, which monitors future travel patterns by analysing 16 million flight reservation transactions each day.
Focusing on the East African Community (EAC) – Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania – arrivals were up 16.4% from September 2016 to January this year. The top ten origin countries all sustained their places from earlier in the year, including African markets which also saw growth, Kenya up 6.4% and Uganda 11.7%.
The future is also looking good for the EAC, with forward bookings from February to July for the region currently running 16.5% ahead of the equivalent period last year.
ForwardKeys says long-haul connectivity could be improved for all EAC key airports – Nairobi Jomo Kenyatta is the only one with connections beyond Europe and the Middle East. And Kigali is the only one to see double-digit growth in international capacity for both long-haul and intra-Africa routes.
“These numbers give cause for genuine optimism”, John Mirenge, the Chief Executive Officer of RwandAir said. “If the growth is sustained throughout the year and beyond, it will be good for our fast growing airline. Considering this growth and other facets of the aviation industry in Africa, very productive discussions are expected from AviaDev Africa summit in October this year, with all parties interested to explore the opening of new routes.”
ForwardKeys predicts future travel patterns by crunching and analysing 16m booking transactions a day. It is used by travel marketers, retailers, hotels, destination marketing organisations (DMOs), financial institutions, car rental companies, tour operators, online travel agents (OTAs), and other traveller-focussed businesses worldwide to monitor and anticipate traveller arrivals and stay ahead of the trends from a particular origin market at a specific time.
The analysis enables them to anticipate the impact of events, better manage their staffing levels, fine tune supply requirements, adjust and measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and predict future market trends. ForwardKeys’ data is retrieved daily from all the major global reservation systems worldwide.
Organized by Bench Events, the Africa Hotel Investment Forum (AHIF) is the premier hotel investment conference in Africa, attracting many prominent international hotel owners, investors, financiers, management companies and their advisers. The company is