Doyens of Gambia Tourism have expressed their worries and concerns on the despicable state of the tourism industry. They raised their arguments at the eleventh graduation ceremony of the Institute of Travel and Tourism of The Gambia (ITTOG), arguing that if Gambian authorities continue to ignore the views of the stakeholders the industry will be doomed.
Angela Andrews Cole Njie is the proprietress and manager of West African Tours. She has spent 37years of service in the tourism industry. According to her, The Gambia Tourism Authorities must put their acts together and get it right, if the Tourism Industry is to benefit any gain from the World Tourism Market.
“They said that healthy developments are happening in countries such as Rwanda, with all its past history of genocide and South Africa. We have been reminded that other countries are trailing above the waters but unfortunately, The Gambia is still trailing under the waters,” Madam Cole Njie argues.
According to her again, the world economic forum has pegged Global Tourism arrivals at 1,023million visitors as of 2017, noting that out of these arrivals, Africa grabbed 62million of the arrivals.
She added that out of the sixty two million arrivals in Africa ,The Gambia continued to benefit little over 150,000 arrivals even though the nation target is to grab at least 500,000 tourists. She said that as far as matters are concerned the country needs to do a lot of improvement to achieve its targeted visitors by 2020.
Madam Cole Njie further submitted that World Tourism Organisation {WTO} records highlighted that the sun and beach holidays represent 28% of global holiday makers. However, she said the sun and beach products are abundantly available in The Gambia but yet the country is below the mark as far as tapping from this market is concerned.
“What do we have in abundance in The Gambia? The Sun and beach, and yet we have not seen the benefit, we supposed to get from these market” she argues.
Madam Cole Njie continues to reveal that Gambia’s Tourism comes on its knees in 1994 when British government issued travel advice. She observed since then, there has been very little improvement in the sector, adding that if the country is to move tourism to high height, then, tourism must be better managed.
“The government needs to give due attention to tourism as an activity for generating employment, creating wealth and as capitalization of public accounts. The growth and impact of tourism needs to be properly managed,” She warns tourism authorities.
According to her, The Gambia needs not to fool herself for not improving on the gains of the industry, arguing that Gambia has only thirty seven hotels that provide seven thousand bed capacities in generating a market share of $150m. She said Gambia can gain more than these figures if tourism is better managed.
The West African Tours manageress acknowledged the challenges confronting the tourism industry, noting that sex tourism, blustering, poor infrastructure, communication, better health facilities and among others, continued to serve as bottlenecks to the country’s tourism industry. She calls on the government to start investing in the industry, disclosing that the government investment on Atlantic hotel, Senegambia and Kairaba hotel have never gone unnoticed as these hotels continued to serve as image of Gambia Tourism Industry.
She argues that whatever The Gambia government might have invested in these hotels have been recovered in hundred fold. “Our products quality need improvements, Dubai, a desert country has transformed themselves, Rwanda have also transformed herself and why not Gambia. Gambia let us transform ourselves,” she said, there is the need for Gambia to be transformed and harness the benefits of Global Tourism Market.
On the positive site of the story, Madam Cole Njie hails the construction of the conference center among others and praised the government for taping from the regional market and for allowing Turkish Airline to operate in The Gambia. This development she said will go a long way in addressing some of the challenges lingering on the tourism industry.
“Today whilst the ministry and GTBoard should be congratulated for increasing the percentage of tourists originating from the European markets over the years, the character of Gambia’s tourism does not changed.
It remains an industry focus on winter sunshine and heavily dependent on package tour operators. I am not saying we should not have package tourism as the present bedrock of our industry is built around such an infrastructure but my proposal is as well as package tourism, let’s develop other products in such a way that will help The Gambia to march the talk about product diversification,” said Adama Bah the Chairman of the Board of Directors of ITTOG.
Author: Kebba Ansu Manneh