Domestic Travel Future: Africa, a restricted area
The immediate future will be domestic travel. For us, at Saffir Africa, the domestic market encompasses all Africa. We therefore propose the extension of the concept of domestic travel to include the entire Africa South of the Sahara (ASoS), going forward. This would mean that a Nigerian traveler would pay the same rates as a Ugandan to access destination Uganda offerings, and vice versa.
Africa, a restricted area.
Africa travel is difficult, circuitous and expensive, and it doesn’t help that rail is still developed along the colonial routes of extraction, or to serve specific politician’s business interests, instead of catering to the interconnectedness of the African countries, for Africans first, for common good. The squabbling over rail development models and competition over infrastructure dominance between neighboring ASoS countries is not useful for growing the individual country economies, either.
We need to also prepare for prolonged travel restrictions, the uncertainty that comes with this and social stigma arising from Covid19, as traditional Western tourism source markets for Africa travel resume business. We can expect there to be wariness as they have been the most impacted by the pandemic, which has a high chance of resurging before large numbers of people have the necessary antibodies to naturally fight off the disease.
(Above map) COVID-19 Reported cases in Africa, 12 April, 2020
Accessibility of country products.
There is also the issue of the closed skies, which we addressed in a previous post, that have upheld the paths of colonial influence tied to Europe, largely due to the skewed postcolonial economic dynamics between ASoS countries and the West.
Flying within Africa is also not viewed, by ASoS governments nor industry players, as essential, unless it is facilitating politicians and the rich in state-owned or private jets. Africa’s passenger share of the global aviation industry is just 2.1%. Of these, 5% are international tourist arrivals. To push this up, more needs to be done to make flying for convenience, in Africa affordable, and grow the road intercountry connections, as 80% of African citizens' travel is within the ASoS region.
(Above map) By Urban Age / LSE Cities
Furthermore, visa restrictions between ASoS countries are a major hurdle to ease of travel. African countries still view each other's citizens with suspicion. Very little by way of economic cooperation has happened to ease this in the last 55 years. They prefer instead to give relaxed visa terms to Westerners and people from the former colonial countries to the detriment of their own people's access. The most radical response for this should include a more accessible single African e-passport, and/or no visa requirements towards a complete open border policy in the ASoS region.
(Above chart) Source: file:///storage/emulated/0/Download/Urban-Age-LSE-Cities_Flight-Patterns_02.jpg
Hospitality products in Africa are similarly still western-facing.
This is not only true of the countrys' product marketing, but of the industry packaging and pricing. Have one set of rates that you charge all year, and only add value in terms of experience/offer based on seasonality of travel from the different source markets. Bearing in mind, that the domestic traveler is better placed to be a return customer, more frequently, based on the experience they get.
Pricing will be the biggest factor towards stimulating demand for travel within Kenya and ASoS. The question however remains: Will the recent tax cuts by the various governments yield significant savings for citizens and hospitality operators? For those hospitality operators with a substantial number of workers earning Kesh 24,000 and below, this might yield some savings. But for how long?
With pricing becoming more important, we are expecting more innovations around pricing to trickle down the industry. For instance, dynamic pricing might replace the seasonal pricing that is most commonly used by hotels and operators. Let price automatically change on your booking system based on the rate of queries. Hotels will also need to adopt better revenue management strategies to handle this (Saffir Africa can help hotels figure this out quickly). This applies to all travel players.
Additionally, making it easier for domestic retail buyers in the ASoS region to pay online without having to convert local currency to US Dollars, will go a long way to enhancing e-commerce, not just in the travel industry, but in general. This will also enhance online access and presence of retail products, as well as the ability to have bespoke payment solutions to cater to different travelers' needs, by retailers.
(Above photo) Mbundia Island beach, Tanzania by Velma Kiome.
Taxing times.
There cannot be any tourism to speak of or promote, without improving the lives of people in those destinations.
Tourism is inextricably linked to people's lives and when people are happy living in a place it becomes a desirable destination.
For tourism to thrive it must center the lives of the very people that are expected to travel in the ASoS region. This will mean that certain socioeconomic cushions need to be put in place to prevent citizens from sliding into complete poverty, during the Covid19 crisis and after, so that more people are ready and able to travel when a semblance of normalcy returns.
These are taxing times, and removing Value Added Tax on fuel would provide overall relief for every sector ensuring that the little citizens in Kenya have left to spend can go further everyday; something that the Kenyan parliament can immediately roll back as part of the raft of laws for the Covid19 crisis lifeline and economic recovery.
In the long-term, ASoS governments will need to reevaluate the model for investment in and access to better quality healthcare for all; healthy nations can keep moving. Improving public healthcare for Africa, will also restore confidence in our system to help Western travelers when the doors into Africa open for them again.
(Above map) Average hospital beds per 1,000 people, hospital beds capacity across Africa is weak
Sustainable tourism as the norm.
Industry players, specifically Tour Operators, who have firsthand experience of the immeasurable value of domestic travel, however say we will not be "recovering" nor "restarting", but "continuing" domestic tourism.
If we are not "restarting" but "continuing", then we should be talking about sustaining it, instead.
The knowledge and experience of individual tour operators, who have been left to shoulder the domestic travel marketing burden on their own for so long, is invaluable in packaging destination Africa for the ASoS domestic market. This experience can be tapped and expanded to create more opportunities for cooperation for country cross marketing to peak the ASoS traveler's curiosity about destination Africa. It will mean seizing the ingenuity of individual country tour operators, and their experience of each destination, while supporting them to increase their capacity to serve the industry.
It is also important to note that while e-commerce for travel has picked up elsewhere in the world, in the ASoS region, there are still low trust levels, making the travel agent an important part of the travel journey.
In Kenya, domestic travelers have largely been ignored in marketing drives and considered a demographic category that needs no investment, as they will travel when they will, anyway.
This ignored category was relegated with the devolution of domestic tourism to County Governments; which are preoccupied with figuring out development for regions that had, by and large, seen very little change in over 50 years since independence, for their populations. It was further relegated when the County Tourism arms were defunded even further.
Airlines, big and small, have taken a hit from the Covid19 crisis. However, unlike in the past, many will not be receiving huge bailouts from governments and will instead need to go back to private shareholders for money in exchange for more stocks, or borrow commercially to keep them going, while increasing accountability to shareholders. Any government bailouts will have to come with preconditions on where to spend; specifically in keeping airline staff in their jobs. They too must seek sustainable ways to be profitable.
Unions will need to prepare their members for the inevitable job loss future. No amount of litigation to preserve jobs will work. The whole world is in a tail spin.
Another area of tourism that will fail the post Covid19 "recovery" is the Protected Area conservancy model, built on a shaky colonial, exclusionary structure, requiring huge amounts in "investment" to "keep it wild". Areas where indigineous people already live their low impact lives, are the richest in biodiversity largely owing to how the people have lived harmoniously with the environment for eons; otherwise, there would be nothing to "conserve".
Local people can achieve better conservation outcomes at a fraction of the cost of the "Big Conservancy" models. Therefore, sustainable tourism in partnership with conservation will thrive post Covid19 on a model that places the stewardship and livelihoods of the local people, indigenous to the area, at the center.
The quest for a "supermarket" for destination Kenya, was never sustainable. The "recovery" for post-Covid19 tourism will need to be built on a foundation of sustainability.
This will be gained from resegmenting the market to include previously ignored travel categories such as archaeological, historical, academic and scientific researchers (students and professionals) with packages that give special access to multi-country ASoS Museums and national archives for duration of stay, Religious pilgrims with other access passes for leisure travel, convention delegates with an invitation to extend stay and tour the continent with special multi-country passes or access to national parks, special access to transit passengers, and creating a network for marketing the things that are connected historically across ASoS countries.
Sustainability comes from ensuring something can remain consistent at the rate it was and grow incrementally transcending any shocks, without relying heavily on external support.
By Velma Kiome
Velma is the Head of partnerships and design at Saffir Africa.