Andrew Kathindi
Hospitality Association of Namibia (HAN) says domestic tourism which has been made possible following re-opening of the country in Stage 2 of the lockdown, will not save the sector. If relied upon, over half of sector could be wiped out by next year.
“Domestic travel is a small ray of hope and it’s something to keep some of us busy for a while but it’s not going to save the tourism industry. If we were to rely on domestic tourism for the next year, we could see more than 50 percent of our industry closing down,” HAN Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Gitta Paetzold told the Windhoek Observer.
She said domestic tourists only make up one percent of the visitors serviced by the sector. This is insignificant compared to higher spending, longer bookings of international visitors.
“We’ve made the estimation and we usually work with 500,000 tourists (not 1.5 million guests or travelers) to Namibia. If we now have 5,000 domestic tourists in Namibia that can spend the thousands of dollars to visit a lodge and hundreds to go out and eat, it’s 1 percent of the market we have to service,” HAN Exec said.
She argued that there was not a lot of money going around for leisure travel even before COVID-19, a position that has been worsened by current job losses and salary cuts.
“When Namibians do spend their extra cash, they like spending it on cars, clothing or traveling across borders or going overseas. Although domestic travel has been promoted since 2006, it is difficult to convince people to do that if they haven’t done that before,” Paetzold said.
She, however, urged locals to take advantage of some of the great discounts currently on offer.
“We’ve got the country to ourselves; we should make use of it. We have wonderful campaigns at the moment like “Local Tourism is Lekker” that are pushing great specials and wonderful rates. Some people are using it for the upcoming long weekends, but it’s not going to cover us.”
Paetzold fingered the closed borders and cancelled air flights; booking cancelations and refunds the industry has been processing since January as the main reasons why the sector will not be able to weather the storm.
“The industry is cash strapped. We don’t know how long this will last. We cannot say, let’s pay employees with the cash that is there, and not pay other bills. We don’t know if we’ll be able to call back the workers to open up the lodges before the end of the year. If it was only a matter of a month or two months, then everyone would have run to the banks and tried to borrow money to live through those months, but tourism is being hit for much longer than a couple of months.”
She said HAN has made appeals to the Tourism ministry to consider the proposal of opening the borders to countries that have recorded success in dealing with COVID-19.
“As it stands, the only savior will be the open market, and we have already made appeals to the line ministry to kick start discussions at cabinet to create travel-for-travel between nations that have the same approach to the pandemic,” she said.
This pronouncement by HAN comes after Environment, Forestry and Tourism minister, Pohamba Shifeta called on the sector to be price-sensitive as a means of encouraging domestic travelers.
The local tourism industry has been hard hit by the closure of the country’s borders as part of government’s measures to control the spread of COVID-19.
