A major charter airline, with Lufthansa benefits, German-based Condor, owned by Thomas Cook, is planning to halt one of its four weekly flights from Frankfurt to Nairobi and on to Mombasa in Kenya.
Due to continued lower than expected demand for tourism travel to Kenya, these flights will be halted from June 26 until October 30. Resumption of the flights after that will be subject to a rise in demand, it was learned.
Kenya’s coast has suffered a severe downturn in business fortunes, especially since British tour operators earlier in the year pulled all their clients out of the beach resorts and flew them home before then canceling their flights to Mombasa as a result of sharpish anti-travel advisories by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
Some regular sources from the coast have described this year as the worst they remember, and recent comments by a staff member of the Kenya Tourism Board about an upturn in business as a result of cruise tourism came promptly under sharp criticism for, as one source put it “being totally disconnected from the situation on the ground.”
In particular, resort operators at the South Coast along the award-winning Diani beaches are skeptical about a rise in occupancies in the immediate near future as long as the much-awaited bypass road from the international airport and the Nairobi to Mombasa highway to Ukunda is not ready.
“We must acknowledge that passing through the Likoni area, and often having to wait for long periods before getting on the ferry, is a critical issue, and we are now paying the price for past governments not providing infrastructure the way they did around Nairobi.
“If this road was ready, we would be able to skirt the trip through the city of Mombasa, and these travel advisories would have no effect on our visitors.
“For this and much of next year, we will have to rely on domestic tourism and hopefully more clients from the region, but as long as expatriates from Uganda or Rwanda have to pay visa fees to enter Kenya, this market is not likely to rise much further.
“I liked your idea the other day about holiday offers for all three countries, from the coast to Kivu, but that needs better packaging and then airfares which support such itineraries, because for now the tickets are still far too expensive.”
Other stakeholders contacted for comments remained silent on the issue of how they see the upcoming festive season perform and if the early part of 2015 will see a rise in occupancies, indicating that the mood remains pensive and more of a “wait and see” mood than bubbling with excitement about better days ahead. There were though the regular murmurs about the Kenyan government not doing enough to provide a better business environment and lowering the cost of doing business by for instance removing the VAT of 16 percent from tourism services, leave alone a range of other supporting measures often asked for but never implemented.
Resorts at the Kenya coast presently offer some spectacular deals for both foreign as well as regional and local visitors, airlines are offering lower fares to fill their seats from overseas to Nairobi and Mombasa and between Nairobi and Mombasa/Malindi, but it goes to show that price is ultimately not what seems to matter.
