By: Nyima Sillah
Hamat N.K Bah, Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture has said the Ukraine-Russia war has caused disaster in the Gambia Tourism Sector.
Mr Bah made this remark on Thursday 9th June during the Gambia Red Cross Society official launching of cash grant program for the tourism informal sector associations under the livelihood project.
“In January we recovered almost over 53 flights out of the 59 flights that existed pre Covid-19, we would have now recovered at least between 40-50% of our arrivals but when the war in Ukraine started, it became another disaster.
“Many people didn’t know why the Ukraine war affect our tourism sector, it is because they need to understand that Ukraine and Russia are one of the biggest players in the chatter industry and when they are down that means most tour operators find it difficult to chatter air crafts to lift their tourists to another destination and other parts of the world,” he said.
“The Gambia was not an exception and it is unfortunate that even this year The Gambia experience will not be coming during the summer season. Adding that they are restarting again in October and many other tour operators,” he added.
However, he explained that the Gambian Government is working in collaboration with their partners to see how best they can engage budget airlines that can come and operate, and fly tourists directly to this country.
“We will work towards getting the resources because that is the only way out to avoid depending entirely on tour operators. We need to find other means of diversifying our tourism sector. We predicted that as far back as November 2019 that there might be a problem in our international source market and as a government, we started drawing strategy as to how not to replace but to at least reduce our dependency on the international source market,” he disclosed.
According to him, they succeeded in attracting a lot of tourists from Senegal, Nigeria coming down to the Gambia, adding that most of the five-star hotels are generally doing very well not because of international tourists but the regional tourists who are coming to the country but again they have some challenges.
“The government of the Gambia is taking new measures towards addressing some of the challenges. If you want to invite a Nigerian tourist you need to have a brand in this country and we don’t have the brands. We need to have a big jewellery market here so if we are to attract Nigeria tourists, we need to encourage people to invest in those sectors, we need big malls we need brands and government is doing everything possible to encouraged people to invest in that area once that is done, be rest assure that Nigerian tourist alone can filled our hotels,” he said.