It’s time we got the best value from our tourist attractions

Wanton poaching decimated these numbers to a historic low of about 18,000 by 1989.

The last 20 years have seen the elephant population reverse the declining trend due to the tremendous efforts of the KWS staff, with elephant numbers now well over 30,000.

But it’s not everywhere where you find 30,000 elephants and slightly over 500 black rhinos existing within the same borders, with a sunny beach an hour’s flight away on its eastern flanks, a Rift Valley straddling its centre and, on its western fringes the source of the great River Nile.

There is only one country in the world that offers all of the above. Kenya! Pardon me for strumming on this “I love Kenya” guitar, but in the greater scheme of things, we have a heck of a lot on offer and for the most part are not charging anywhere near €300 a night for bed only in the Maasai Mara — neither are we charging usurious cover charges in nondescript restaurants for that matter.

It is a question of choosing between mass tourists who come on cheap holiday packages, never leaving their hotel rooms to purchase items from our domestic curio markets, eat at our restaurants or spend money in our retail outlets, or electing to push for a higher end tourist segment that is willing to pay more thereby creating value for the country by ensuring the tourism industry is a larger source of tax revenues.

This argument can be viewed as simplistic at best and utopian at worst.

But from an East African regional perspective, the other countries have nothing on us when it comes to hospitality, wildlife variety — my sources at KWS say that neither Ethiopia nor Rwanda have rhinos, Uganda has three and Tanzania has 66 — and domestic air travel options.

So let us go back to the drawing board, raise those tourist visa prices and stop wondering what will happen to tourists who quibble about a $50 visa, those are the cheap fellows.

Let us raise our park fees for international tourists and increase the taxes on room rates to get more tax shillings for the country.

Let us begin to look at our wildlife as the scarce commodity that it is, and price ourselves up.

Carol.musyoka@bungani.com