Despite Zambia investing over US$1 billion in upgrading its airport infrastructure, the timing of the completion of these projects coincided with the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic, making it difficult to immediately start making a return on this investment.
Come 2022, living with the Covid pandemic is turning into the new normal, and the prospects of international travel is looking brighter. The Livingstone Tourism Association of Zambia – LTA chairperson Hillary Kashempe is hopeful that the sector will start its recovery.
Kashempe disclosed that the year 2022 will work more like a test for the tourism sector, and the industry is very hopeful that they will start recovery because the industry lost a huge chunk of future bookings.
The tourism industry is basing it’s recovery and hope on the low covid numbers being recorded from both source and our destination countries. The industry hopes to begin to recover in the next few months. He added that full recovery from the COVID effects might even take two to three years.
In an exclusive interview with Zambian Business Times-ZBT, Kashempe said that covid restrictions and quarantine requirements were the biggest contributors to the dampening of the tourism industry, among others.
The LTA Chairman further added that it’s also very possible to continue adhering to covid guidelines while running business respectively, he added that this can be done by encouraging travel and being stable as a sector.
Kashempe alluded to the fact that in the last two years when covid hit the most, alot of people lost jobs and had companies reducing operation by almost 50% and or more. So, the industry customers lost jobs which also affected the revenues our members could generate.
He added that the industry was also determined and made sacrificial moves and worked on the basis of hope by returning employees but then still productivity was to the bare minimum.
Our approach this year is more hopeful and this has brought more of expectations and less job loses. The industry has however learnt some lessons but can not run away from maintainance and operational costs if at all the pandemic became worse, Kashempe told ZBT.
He has since encouraged tourism industry players to make the most out of arising business opportunity such as local tourism in order to cover up for the lost revenues from international tourism.
Analysts say Zambia has enough tourist attractions across its ten provinces that could be leveraged to become a major contributor to bringing in forex into the country and provide an alternative to the current over dependance on copper exports. This could help to stabilize and stem the perpetual depreciation of the local unit – the Kwacha.
