COMESA considers borderless tourism market

TOURISM officials from the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) are expected to launch the first steps towards creating a borderless tourism market as part of building sustainable tourism industry across the 19 member countries.Officials drawn from all COMESA member countries meeting in Nairobi since Wednesday for a 2-day brainstorming conference will agree on issues like developing a common selling point for regional tourism market, coming up with innovative and cheaper tourism products to promote domestic tourism and coming up with modalities of improving the regional tourism image at the international arena. “The tourism offerings within COMESA are unique and diverse, offering a huge tourism potential that we should exploit. As we do other things, we should also come up with modalities of correcting the bad image perception on the region created by the international media,” Kenya’s Tourism Minister Danson Mwazo, said.A borderless tourism market is part of integration efforts currently being undertaken within COMESA, an already free trade area that is set to link up with the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) and the East Africa Community (EAC) by mid-2014 to create Africa’s largest free trade area. Officials are expected to come up with a common strategy for launching a borderless tourism market on Thursday when the conference ends. Issues that came up for discussion on the first day of the conference include proposal to review air travel costs within the region and increase of air traffic within major cities as lack of that currently makes it very expensive to travel by air. For instance, flying from the Kenyan capital Nairobi to the Burundian capital Bujumbura costs an estimated 725 U.S. dollars by air, nearly the same cost of travelling from Nairobi to London and back.Officials also agreed there was need by respective tourism markets to give focus to cultural preservation to ensure sustainability of tourism markets and as part of diversifying tourism markets available in the region. For instance, while a country like Tanzania is stronger on game and beach tourism, Swaziland is stronger in cultural tourism and therefore complements the regional tourism offerings. Creating a borderless market is also the best way of encouraging domestic tourism to balance with the current over dependence on tourists from Western countries. African economies are seen as growing and factors like new mineral resource discoveries and growing service industries have been tipped as growth drivers of the future that will create adequate middle class with disposable income to travel within the region.The conference in Kenya is the first in the series of COMESA Sustainable Tourism Development Forum.The Nairobi conference will analyse the regional diagnostic study of COMESA’s 19 Member States, whose aim was to come up with a framework for regional approaches that can be undertaken by both the public and private sector stakeholders to promote a more competitive, investor friendly, sustainable tourism sector in the region.