The Kenyan Tourist Board’s (KTB) claim that arrival numbers in the first four months of this year fell by just four per cent was met with incredulity from TPS Eastern Africa, which operates the Serena chain of hotels, luxury lodges and tented camps.
“We must be joking,” a statement from the company issued this weekend said.
The company’s own review of how its hotels fared in the first half of 2014 compared with last year, showed that business on the coast fell by 30-50 per cent, while inland trips to destinations such as the Maasai Mara game reserve and Mount Kenya, dropped by 20 per cent.
A female tourist was shot dead in Mombasa last week, the second tourist to have been killed this month, after a Russian visitor was robbed and murdered by a gang – both in the Kibokoni area of the city.
TPS said the board’s statement was “not in touch with the reality on the ground,” adding: “We wonder if KTB and the Kenya tourism industry live in the same Kenya. It is not business as usual – let us not kid ourselves.”
But the figures were based on landing cards that pre-dated the mid-June spate of violence on the Lamu coast which has led to the deaths of more than 100 people.
Tourist arrival figures for the first half of the year will be released in the next three weeks, a spokesman for KTB said.
Some 900 tourists cut short their holidays after the British Foreign Office issued a travel warning about Mombasa on May 14, Reuters reported.
Tourist numbers slid last year to 1.5 million after an all-time peak of 1.8 million in 2011.
Nigel Vere Nicoll, CEO of the African Travel & Tourism Association (Atta), said the Foreign Office ban on all but essential travel to Mombasa Island – albeit excluding Diani or Moi international airports – affected numbers travelling to the coast.
Even though the airports are exempt from the ban, TUI, which owns the travel firms Thomson and First Choice, cancelled all outbound flights to Mombasa – and therefore all of its flights to Kenya – until October 31.
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Source: The Telegraph
