Online Reporter
VICTORIA Falls is Zimbabwe’s most popular tourist attraction, as well as Zambia, and a major factor for the growth of tourism in north-east Botswana as ever more people flow into the area every day, every month and every year.
Last year Zimbabwe’s Department of Immigration processed 1 225 167 travellers into the north-west of the country, the area surrounding the Falls, almost 8 percent more than the 1,1 million processed in 2024.
This is a magnificent achievement, largely attributable to the new systems being installed in our border posts, both for the busy land border crossing into Zambia and the exceptionally busy Victoria Falls International Airport.
This allows international travellers a largely queue-free entry into Zimbabwe, and that enhances our already good international reputation of having both rational rules and making sure that these are administered fairly and efficiently.
All that helped gain Zimbabwe the top “must visit” slot of the Forbes Magazine list last year, and will help ensure that we maintain a high rating.
But this is only part of what we need to do. That huge flood of people pouring into Victoria Falls City is all very well, and helps ensure that the investment into hotel beds is worthwhile, with local investors well presented with specialist and family-orientated accommodation, so spreading the tourism revenue and ensuring that visitors can have a selection based on cuisine and price.
But the build-up of numbers means we either have to ration access, which would be a most unpleasant option, or encourage people to come into the Falls area for just a few hours as part of a more general Southern African holiday, and therefore limiting what we can do to make their holiday more solidly Zimbabwean.
The other option, and the only one that both adds value to a visitor’s experience and keeps the pressure on the core attraction, the Falls themselves, within sustainable limits to add to the activities we offer, which has the extra advantage of making the industry more viable and boosting incomes.
This first started decades ago with daily boat cruises up the Zambezi upstream of the Falls. With game areas and national park protection along the banks of the river, tourists have had their experiences enhanced and have been able to see a lot more than in the past. While water rafting in the gorges downstream of the Falls gives visitors a sight of where the gradually retreating Falls once fell, as well as some very exciting times.
Other investors looked at golf courses and conference facilities, giving people multiple reasons for a visit, including a larger batch of domestic tourists, again without increasing the ecological pressure on the Falls. All these activities are to get more multiple layers of value, rather than offer simple either-or alternatives.
Rather we want visitors to come and experience a wide range of attractions, and not just experience them, but also feel they have been treated fairly and properly and received full value for their time and money.
We like to quote our ranking on the Forbes list, but we must also remember that this is generated by ordinary Forbes readers, perhaps better off than many, but also discriminating in what sort of service they are offered. We need to be fair to keep our ratings up.
Northwest Zimbabwe contains one of the largest concentrations of national parks land and wildlife in the country, as well as a range of ecological zones.
The rebuilding of the Bulawayo-Victoria Falls highway, with some tight scheduling, is going to give far better access to a wider range of attractions and do more to help visitors plan a longer holiday, thus adding value to their own visit and Zimbabwe’s growing number of tourism investors and workers.
The Victoria Falls not only anchor Zimbabwe’s tourism sector, but are also the centrepiece of the huge transnational park being opened up and connected across a swathe of Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia and Angola.
That park needs the Falls as its core attraction, but also has so much potential to offer that it can be a major driver of development in the area, as well a vital scientific and ecological attraction in its own right.
So the success of the growing tourism industry in Victoria Falls is already composed of many factors, not just people coming to see a major global river flow over a cliff face, although that is the starting point.
But we have been building up, without spoiling the area or the view or the wilderness, a wider range of attraction and that sort of careful and sensitive development can continue adding value all round.
