This was disclosed here by Botswana Tourism Organisation (BTO) acting CEO, Keitumetse Setlang, in an interview with BusinessWeek at the recently-ended Africa Travel Indaba.
Working collaboratively with the Local Enterprise Authority (LEA) and Citizen Entrepreneurial Development Agency (CEDA), BTO brought over 30 tourism businesses operating at various levels to showcase their products and services at the Indaba, an annual event considered Africa’s premier gathering for tourism businesses.
Botswana has a well-established tourism market in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, but Setlang emphasised the need to penetrate new markets.
“The Chinese market is very important to the tourism sector in Africa and Botswana is no exception,” she said. “We have been encouraging key industry players at the Indaba to explore the Chinese market. “ "Even at home, we have been urging tourism businesses to consider setting their footprints in the Chinese market.”
She added that BTO is now doing research to establish the exact market that is ready to travel out of China.
“We want to know if it’s the middle age, whether it is the upper age market or is it the family market that is ready to travel outside. “The study will help us to come up with a strategy that will enable us to effectively explore the China market. “We don’t want to be shooting in the dark,” she said.
She also highlighted that Botswana intends to use its strong ties with China as a competitive edge in a bid to lure Chinese tourists to Botswana.
South Africa, Kenya, and Ethiopia are some of the countries that have been working hard to lure Chinese tourists to their respective countries. The rise in figures of Chinese tourists entering Africa over the last five years has been largely attributed to the introduction of relaxed visa conditions in the continent. Just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the number of Chinese tourists visiting Africa had reached 800,000 (annually) as cited by various sources. It is anticipated that the figures will improve once the continent has fully shrugged off the effects of the pandemic. The World Tourism Organisation has also made a bold prediction that China will extensively benefit the tourism sector in Africa this year.
Before COVID, Botswana was making inroads in terms of attracting Chinese tourists to its shores.
For example, figures disclosed by Statistics Botswana in 2018 indicate that the number of Chinese tourists visiting Botswana totalled 7,447 in 2016 up from 1,138 the previous year. Although there are no readily available figures on the recent local trends regarding the Chinese market, industry players have attested to the fact that the gains made from 2016 were aggressively reversed by COVID-19.
Setlang added that part of the reason BTO has taken Botswana tourism businesses to the Indaba is to explore the Australian market.
“We are saying to tourism businesses in Botswana, do not put your eggs in one basket because the tourism market is increasingly becoming volatile. “They should expand to new markets. “Australians have been coming to Botswana but not in large numbers. “The preliminary research we have done highlights that the Australian market can be lucrative to Botswana if fully explored. “We (BTO and its stakeholders) are using the Indaba to create a path that will enable us to aggressively go into the Australian market,” Setlang told BusinessWeek.
She added that there is also potential to gain more market share in countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg.
