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| Bavarian Africa: Windhoek, Namibia, reflects its German colonial heritage. Newscom/FILE |
Namibia strikes 'new gold' – tourists
Impressive growth of visitors from nontraditional places, including China, now put tourism ahead of gold mining.
from the March 26, 2008 edition
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"Historically, South Africa looked to Europe for visitor numbers," says Ntsiki Mpulo, communications manager for South Africa Tourism, the government-supported marketing company for South Africa. But, she continues, "South Africa Tourism has opened up Africa, the Americas, and Asia, as these are all the markets of the future."
Here in Namibia, tourism officials have taken a similar tack.
"We have been focusing on Europe for the past 15 years, with an emphasis on Germans," says Gitta Paetzold, CEO of the Hospitality Association of Namibia. "Slowly but surely we've been extending our market reach."
Last year, for instance, the government of Namibia signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese government, which put Namibia on the list of acceptable destinations for Chinese citizens. Representatives of the Namibian Tourism Board – the quasi-governmental body responsible for marketing the country – also visited China to start laying groundwork for a full-scale marketing campaign.
"China is a strategic market for Namibia, due to the business and political ties that exist between the two countries," the tourism board said in a press release.
China's business influence in Africa has been growing exponentially – the Council on Foreign Relations says Chinese trade in the continent is now more than $50 billion a year.
"There's a big correlation between the success of business travel and later leisure travel that comes out of it," Tatalias says. "People come here driven by profits. But then they come out, and they do their meetings, and they do their conferences, and they think, 'Hey, this isn't a bad place at all.' "
Still, Tatalias and others in the tourism industry say there are still barriers to Chinese tourism in southern Africa. Few guides speak Mandarin, and the choices for Chinese food are slim. Chinese travelers often want to visit two or three countries on one trip, but have only a week or two for vacation, tourism experts say. That puts countries such as Namibia, with its vast distances between tourist spots, at a disadvantage.
But African governments are addressing these gaps, offering Mandarin language classes for tour guides and increasing their marketing within China. Chinese government statistics seem to indicate that something is working: Almost 200,000 Chinese tourists visited Africa in 2006, about three times as many as two years prior.
China is not the only new target. Southern African countries are increasingly marketing themselves to India – another "market of the future" with high-spending travelers, according to Ms. Mpulo. Tourists from other African countries also make up a growing percentage of visitors in southern Africa.
In Namibia, tourism experts say the trick is to show potential visitors that their country is distinct from neighboring South Africa, which governed Namibia until 1990. They promote Namibia's red sand deserts and 975-mile coastline, the game viewing and deep-sea fishing, the first-world infrastructure and – a not-so-subtle dig at South Africa – the country's low crime rate.
"We've only been independent for 17 years," says Ms. Paetzold, of the Hospitality Association. "And we've only done tourism marketing for seven or eight…. But we have so many things that make us special."
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