Zambia Tourism Board: Visitor numbers up

Zambia Tourism Board (ZTB) has said 906,417 tourists visited the country in 2011 compared to 815,000 arrivals recorded in 2010.

Zambia Tourism Board (ZTB) has said 906,417 tourists visited the country in 2011 compared to 815,000 arrivals recorded in 2010.

The tourism board will this year spend about K9.8 billion on marketing aimed at attracting local and foreign tourists to meet the targeted one million visitors.

ZTB marketing director Evans Muhanga said the current estimated figures for 2011 indicated that Zambia attracted 906,417 tourists, higher than the number attained in 2010.

In 2010, ZTB recorded 815,000 arrivals compared to 906,417 achieved last year when ZTB rebranded to ‘Let’s Explore’, meant to attract more tourists and create an environment that ensures an equitable balance between development needs of the country and an investment climate for wealth creation.

In an interview in Lusaka, Mr Muhanga said the board was on course to attracting the one million tourists by the end of this year.

“We are still cleaning up the figures for 2011 and 906,417 tourists for 2011 is an estimate,” he said.

Recently, Mr Muhanga outlined the 2012 marketing plan with the total budget for marketing activities pegged at K9.8 billion, of which K3.7 billion would be channelled to promoting domestic tourism and K4.9 billion for international marketing.

The overall marketing objectives were to attain one million tourist arrivals by the end of 2012, increase tourists’ duration of stay from an average three days to seven days and attain tourism sector Gross Domestic Product contribution of 10 per cent per annum, from the current seven per cent.

The ZTB 2012 marketing strategy will focus on maintaining the traditional source markets for tourists, expanding and developing new emerging markets, growing the domestic market and attracting more tourists to Zambia to meet the target.

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Linda Hohnholz

Editor in chief for eTurboNews based in the eTN HQ.

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