ZTA promotes destination Zim at Africa Travel Indaba

Business Reporter

Zimbabwe is seeking to grow and consolidate its regional tourism market share through the 2023 edition of the ongoing Africa Travel Indaba (ATI) exhibition in Durban, South Africa.

The tourism show in Durban comes hot on the heels of successful similar efforts, which saw the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority (ZTA) signing a partnership agreement with Emirates to promote destination Zimbabwe across the world.

At ATI, Zimbabwe is seeking to promote the Southern African region to the world.

Minister of Environment, Climate, Tourism, and Hospitality Industry, Mangaliso Ndlovu is leading the strong Zimbabwe contingent of players from the tourism industry at the travel trade showcase.

Zimbabwe is set to showcase its wide variety of top-drawer tourism products to attract international buyers and media from across the globe.

Running up to Thursday, May 11 2023 in Durban, South Africa, ATI is Africa’s largest travel trade show, hosted by South African Tourism, with the specific objective of creating market access for the diverse collection of African tourism products.

It is also one of the largest tourism marketing events on the global calendar.

As such, Zimbabwe is looking forward to engaging with African colleagues and learning from their best practices and innovations.

Africa on its own is a significant source of tourists to Zimbabwe, and the hospitality sector players are attending the travel show to augment vacationers’ inflows from the region by at least 20 percent.

South Africa is currently the largest tourist source market for Zimbabwe, contributing 30 percent of total arrivals in 2022. About 292 000 visitors to the country came from South Africa last year.

The Second Republic has been pushing for initiatives that elevate the tourism and hospitality sector through the development of a national tourism policy to cement and enhance the sector’s recovery maximizing economic returns at the same time.

The policy seeks to increase investment into the tourism sector.

In 2022 investment into the sector jumped by 239 percent to US$306, 7 million from US$90,4 million in 2021.

President Mnangagwa doubled up the efforts at promoting tourism when he recently launched the National Tourism Recovery and Growth Strategy.

ZTA chief executive officer, Ms Winnie Muchanyuka indicated she believes that tourism can only grow and contribute positively to the socio-economic development in Africa if countries work together.

“As Zimbabwe, we are attending ATI to consolidate and grow our regional market share.

“This year’s edition has a strong contingent of more than 30 local tourism operators, an increase from 24 that took part last year.

“We have seen a significant improvement from last year’s tourism sector performance, and we have received substantial amounts of business from the South African market,” said Ms Muchanyuka.

She said she was confident that Zimbabwe would make a lasting impression at this year’s edition adding that she was delighted by ‘smaller’ players partaking in travel to market their products.

“This has immense benefits to their businesses and can impact (positively) their growth trajectory.

“The level of participation of the tourism players from Zimbabwe is quite impressive, and as ZTA, we are grateful to the industry for supporting our strategic goal in promoting the destination,” she added.

Zimbabwe Helicopter tour operator MJ Air, Director Gerald Zumbika said he was looking forward to benefiting immensely from exhibiting at the ATI.

“We are delighted to be exhibiting with the ZTA at this year’s edition of ATI and we are looking forward to creating meaningful and fruitful business connections in our quest to strengthen business generated from this market.

Tourism is considered a low-hanging fruit for the country in terms of foreign currency generation and employment and is part of key locomotive sectors that will be critical in achieving sustainable economic growth as enunciated in the National Development Strategy 1 (NDS 1).

Currently, the Government in collaboration with ZTA is running the “Invest in Zimbabwe” campaign where they have come up with ways of engaging with the international market.