The dilemma of low hotel occupancies

vacanciess
vacanciess
Avatar of Linda Hohnholz
Written by Linda Hohnholz

With the high season over the holidays truly over, hotel occupancies in many of the coastal resorts and also the safari lodges across Kenya have returned to pre-Christmas lows.

With the high season over the holidays truly over, hotel occupancies in many of the coastal resorts and also the safari lodges across Kenya have returned to pre-Christmas lows. The continued struggle by the countryโ€™s marketers to portray the Kenya coast as safe to visit โ€“ and indeed there have been no major security incidents for a while now โ€“ and lure tourists back to the beaches and safari parks, has not yet yielded the turnaround many are now hoping for in the New Year.

The domestic travel market is normally restricted to long weekends and school holidays, especially over the festive season, when it was Kenyans and East African residents giving occupancies a massive boost. With all hands on deck at work, however, this market has now also reduced to much lower levels and resorts and safari lodges are seeking ways and means to spur demand.

A number of mails received over the past few days indicates that several properties have started to charge Kenyans and East African residents unseasonally low rates already, nearly as low as the traditional low season after Easter until the end of June or mid-July, and Air Kenya has followed suit. They announced over the weekend that they will bring forward their own low season rates to become effective on January 15 when it said: โ€œIn a bid to kick start 2015, Air Kenya has made the decision to bring forward the low season fares to January 15, 2015. What this means is that the low season fares which normally take effect from April 1 – June 30, 2015, will instead start as soon as January 15 – June 30, 2015.

โ€œWe hope our gesture will go a long way towards improving your sales, packages, circuits into Kenya’s finest locations, especially this time of the year when Kenya’s weather is hot with lots of sunshine everywhere!

โ€œThe high season operational schedule/timetable remains in place until March 31, 2015.โ€

The impact on the market will be closely monitored to see what improvements in occupancies on flights and in lodges and resorts this measure will bring, and no doubt Tourism Kenya will wait with bated breath now to get the statistics for the full year 2014 and publish them. โ€œIt is important we get those figures very quickly now to see the trend in arrivals. In the absence of hard data, it is very difficult to react to patterns. There are major tourism trade shows coming up over the next few months, starting with FITUR in Spain and leading to ITB in Berlin in March. We need to be armed with facts, and the sooner we know how the year ended the better. I admire how you got the figures from the Seychelles in the space of a few days and were able to publish them. We need to understand that statistics and data are tools of our trade and not state secrets as you often put it. The challenge is on the Kenya Tourism Board (KTB) now to get us the data so when we go out to promote, we do it on an informed basis, knowing the performance of each country of origin of our tourists.โ€

I think no one can argue with that, but the most hardcore sycophants continue to mistake and misrepresent media critique, no matter how constructive it is, as attempts to bring Kenya down. For them, 2015 will also hopefully bring a change of direction.

About the author

Avatar of Linda Hohnholz

Linda Hohnholz

Editor in chief for eTurboNews based in the eTN HQ.

Share to...