Tuesday January 13, 2004

Ways to develop Ethiopia’s Tourism Industry
 

Freelance travel journalist, Bob Maddams, works for the Guardian and the Independent newspapers in the UK and is one is one of the few British travel writers who regularly  visits and writes about Ethiopia.

By Bob Maddams
Bobmaddams@aol.com
 

An article appeared in this paper last week by Belay Chebsi under the headline: We should devise innovative strategies to tap Ethiopia Tourism Industry. Here are some thoughts:
If I was charged with the job of attracting visitors to Ethiopia this is what I would do. First I would recognise that Ethiopia simply doesn’t have the financial resources to compete with most of the other national tourist boards fighting for the attention of the same visitors. So the first thing I would do is look at how Ethiopia spends its promotional money. As a travel journalist I am constantly at the receiving end of national tourist boards’ marketing efforts. Why? Because they want me to say nice things about them in the travels sections of the newspapers I write for, and persuade people to take their holidays there. That in a nutshell is how the travel PR machine works. And the point is it does work.
But Ethiopia faces a large problem in that it simply doesn’t have the huge promotional budgets that other national tourist boards enjoy. Similarly, very few of the big commercial tour companies feature – and hence promote – Ethiopia as part of their itineraries. So if Ethiopia is to promote itself as efficiently as possible it has to cut its marketing and promotional cloth accordingly. It simply can’t compete with the big boys and be and try and be all things to all people.
So my first measure would be to cancel Ethiopia’s presence at the large international trade fairs such as World Travel Market and ITB. They’re very expensive and for Ethiopia a waste of money in my view. Despite what the exhibition organisers might tell you, in my experience speaking as a travel journalist, journalists and travel editors avoid them like the plague and only attend them under duress. So I can see no publicity advantage to be gained by attending. Instead I would appoint Public Relations companies in key countries with strong contacts with the press. With its limited financial resources Ethiopia cannot afford a scattergun approach, so this raises the question where should its promotional firepower be concentrated. There are three groups I would brief the PR companies to target.
The first target group is gap year students. This is a relatively recent and strongly growing sector within the travel industry. Gap year students are young people, usually aged around 18 who want to see something of the world in the year they take-off between finishing school and starting university. They are looking for precisely the sort of work-life-travel experience that Ethiopia can offer in abundance. These “holidays” are supervised by NGOs and other organizations working in developing countries. For a fee they house and feed the gap year students, and set them to work building schools, teaching English or helping communities in numerous other ways. At the end of a few months work, the students then take time off to travel in the country. Prince William most famously brought type of travel experience to people’s attention when he did something similar in South America during his gap year. This initiative may need the government and other organizations, such as NGOs working in Ethiopia, to work together to set it up, but it can be done.
The second group is backpackers. Ethiopia’s offering is perfect for them. Cheap travel and accommodation, direct access to the country via the numerous departure points around the world that serve Addis Ababa, history, ancient culture, ethnic peoples, landscape and wildlife, Ethiopia has everything the backpacker is looking for. What’s more, Ethiopia is relatively speaking still “off the beaten track”, a distinct lure for the more intrepid traveller. Backpacking has its phases and trends just like all other kinds of holidays.
South America used to be the number one backpacker destination. Then the focus shifted to South East Asia. A few years ago everyone in backpacking circles was talking about Vietnam being “the new Thailand”. So why can’t Ethiopia be the new India for backpackers? Ethiopia’s time will surely come, so why not make it now. I would tell these people specifically about the things Ethiopia has to offer them. However, mention the word backpackers to anyone in the travel industry and you’re almost guaranteed to hear the cry, but they don’t have much money to spend. Actually that’s not true. Okay, backpackers may not have as much disposable income as say retired couples doing it in style, but they’re still spenders. And when you think about it Ethiopia is particularly well placed to take advantage of lower income travellers.
Ethiopia represents a less expensive destination to visit and travel around, and by having lower operating overheads, such as cheap internal travel and low price accommodation, Ethiopian businesses can still make reasonable profits out of backpackers’ more meagre budgets. The recent inclusion of Ethiopia in the Lonely Planet series, the backpacker’s Bible, suggests to me that I’m not the only one out there who realises that backpackers and Ethiopia are made for each other.
Which brings me to the third target group, those with money to spend. The question is how to identify, and reach, those from this all-important group who would be interested in visiting Ethiopia. It’s no good just banging on about Lalibela, Axum, Gonder, Awash, the Bale Mountains, the Blue Nile Falls, the Omo Valley, etc, etc to anyone you think might listen, stunning those these locations are. Ethiopia simply can’t afford to, remember.
The trick is to define which type of visitor is most likely to be interested in what Ethiopia has to offer. There’s an interesting precedent here, which I think can benefit Ethiopia’s tourist industry, and it comes from America. America is now a popular destination for British visitors. This wasn’t always the case. What put America on the British tourist map twenty years or so ago was Disneyland in Florida. It became the must-visit place for British families with young children. Before Disneyland not many British people visited America because, quite frankly, we were a little bit scared of the place. Disneyland changed all that. It offered families a safe and secure compound from which they never ventured out. Then families started going a second time, and because they’d been before this time they felt a little bit braver. So instead of spending the entire two weeks within the confines of the park, they hired a car for a couple of days and had a look around. And guess what, they realised that America wasn’t so scary after all. In fact, they actually rather liked what they saw and experienced of the place.
Next time they went they only spent a week in Disneyland and then spent a week exploring the Florida Keys. And the time after that they didn’t even go to Florida at all, they tried out California, or South Carolina or Washington DC. This trend built, so much so that UK visitors are now one of the key markets for the American tourist industry.
The lesson to be learnt here for Ethiopia is this. Suppose you swapped the word Disneyland for the words African Safari. This is what I think might happen. I think there are a large number of people from all over Europe, and North America too, who have done two or three Safari holidays, be they in Kenya, Tanzania or South Africa, and who are now looking for a richer, more meaningful, alternative African experience. They’ve become what we used to call “Old Africa hands”. They’re wise to Africa, know what to expect and have lost any fear that they might have had previously. What’s more, they’ve done the wildlife and landscape thing and are looking for something else to stimulate them.
I believe, with its vast cultural and historical heritage, no African can score higher than Ethiopia in this area. But a word of warning…These people are wealthy and are used to high standards of quality and service, and the challenge for Ethiopia’s developing tourist industry is to be able to satisfy these expectations. From my standpoint as a writer about Ethiopia I see signs that this challenge is being met. And it’s not just Ethiopian Airlines, the Hilton and the Sheraton that are leading the way. It’s also the excellent offering of some of the independent tour companies, and developments such as Bishangari Lodge, which clearly show that Ethiopia is capable of delivering a travel experience that is the equal of any to be found anywhere else in the world. For me this is where the future for Ethiopia’s tourism industry lies, and with it all the attendant economic and social benefits a successful tourism industry can bring to the country.