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

My fellow alumni Julius Kipng'etich, director of Kenya Wildlife Services, shared a valuable insight at our Fast Forward Leadership Unusual seminar last year.

Our wildlife is simply a priceless resource.

It is a scarce commodity that has dwindled over time and an asset that, due to its increasing paucity, will do nothing but appreciate in future.

It is primarily for that very reason that our tourism industry should price accordingly as we have a much sought after resource that is taking a significant amount of taxpayer’s money to preserve and protect.

I was galvanised into remembering this insight as I toured the ancient City State of Venice, Italy, earlier this month.

The northern Italian city of Venice on the coast of the Adriatic City is over 1,500 years old and a major tourist attraction.

Venice is one of the most important tourist destinations in the world, due to it being one of the world’s greatest and most beautiful cities of art.

The city has an average of 50,000 tourists a day (2007 estimates).

In 2006, it was the world’s 28th most internationally visited city, with 2.927 million international arrivals that year.

In the same year the National Bureau of Statistics website shows that Kenya received about 1.3 million holiday and business tourists.

What takes tourists to Venice?

Venice is world-famous for its canals. It is built on an archipelago of 117 islands formed by 177 canals in a shallow lagoon.

The islands on which the city is built are connected by 455 bridges.

In the old centre, the canals serve the function of roads, and almost every form of transport is on water or on foot.

Venice is therefore Europe’s largest urban car free area, unique in Europe in remaining a sizeable functioning city in the 21st century entirely without motorcars or trucks.

Tourism has been a major sector of Venetian industry since the 18th century, when it was a major centre for the grand tour, due to its beautiful cityscape, uniqueness and rich musical and artistic cultural heritage.

Why is this important?

To stay on the island you have to pay at least €300 (approximately Sh30,000) a night, while decent hotels charging half of that are at least one water taxi and two bus rides away on the mainland.

Mind you, the €300 hotel rate is bed only — no meals.

But, you are getting a Venetian experience. Most restaurants will levy a cover charge of two to four Euros (Sh200 to Sh400) per person on your bill at the end of the meal. A cover charge?

Yes, indeed.

For simply having the experience of sitting in the restaurant and experiencing Venetian hospitality.

Add to that a random additional 12 to15 per cent service charge and we swiftly learnt to look out for the signs on some of the restaurants that clearly stated “No cover charge, No service charge” in order to have a decent meal without feeling that we had been robbed in a dimly lit hole-in-the-wall.

The point is as simple as it is obvious.

There is only one city in the world that is over 15 centuries old, with historic churches, architecture and art, and whose singular method of transportation is by boat.

A priceless resource; a scarce commodity. They make you pay through the nose to experience it.

A few countries

Meanwhile, back at this ranch, we have wildlife that is found in only a handful of countries in Africa.

Some, like the rhino and the elephant, have been hunted to near extinction.

According to KWS statistics, the estimated elephant population in 1973 was about 167,000.

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