Tourism and Arts Minister Ronald Chitotela, has said that he wants the ministry to work with tourism operators to go onto big international media marketing platforms to attract more tourist arrivals into the country.
In a statement to the Zambian Business Times – ZBT by ministry of Tourism public relations officer Sakabilo Kalembwe, Chitotela who was speaking during a tour of Anambezi located in the Lower Zambezi National Park on November 11, 2019, where he is expected to have meetings with tour operators.
The tourism minister said showing Zambian tourism on channels like BBC, CNN and Electronic platforms would sell into a good share of the more than 700 million viewers that watch CNN and more than 6 billion people that access e-platforms. He added that there is need to also target the younger generation that now influence their parent’s decision on where to go for holiday making.
The Minister has since urged his Permanent Secretary, Amos Malupenga to engage the local tourism operators to seek support on meeting the advertising budget.
And a representative of the tour operators, Grant Cummings said private sector would be willing to come on board if the ministry came up with a good tourism-marketing plan. The Lower Zambezi is one of the four national parks that are highly visited by international tourists and major contributors to the Zambia’s tourism revenues.
The Lower Zambezi tourism offering has not been actively offering local Zambians attractive tourism packages which should be one of the agenda items so that the offering can be well appreciated across the country.
Some sections of society have welcomed the proposed copper mining in the Lower Zambezi National Park on the promise of better paying jobs for the locals when compared with the current jobs for lodge workers and tour guides.
The Lodge operators have been accused of making the offering exclusive and beyond the price points of local Zambians thereby making the tourism offering being barely unknown to a cross section of Zambians relative to other tourism hotspots like Livingstone and Siavonga.
