AirZim, which last operated regular and reliable flights to Kariba a few years ago, said last week it would be flying the Chinese-assembled MA60 airliners on the route to connect Kariba and Victoria Falls from Harare.
ZIMBABWE’s tourism industry has welcomed the reintroduction of scheduled flights to the resort town of Kariba by Air Zimbabwe (AirZim), which will operate three flights per week from August 2014. The national airline, which last operated regular and reliable flights to Kariba in 1996, said last week it would be flying the Chinese-assembled MA60 airliners on the route to connect Kariba and Victoria Falls from Harare.
The tourism industry in Kariba continues to suffer from the pullout of AirZim and other airlines caused by an unprecedented economic crisis that started over a decade ago. Foreign tourists to Zimbabwe take connecting flights in Harare to such resorts as Victoria Falls, Hwange, Kariba and Gonarezhou.
Tour operators in Kariba have been saying the past decade had been difficult for the industry with potential visitors preferring to connect to Victoria Falls than take expensive chartered flights from Harare, or drive by road, to Kariba. “We hope this service will be a long relationship that AirZim is developing with the tourism industry,” said Paul Matamisa, chief executive officer at the Zimbabwe Council for Tourism (ZCT), the private sector arm of the industry.
“We look forward to a long relationship because this service has been stop-start-stop-start. We hope there will be a programme to develop the market because we have been agitating for this service but we only read in the newspapers that it has been introduced. AirZim did not communicate. We need a strong promotion for people to come on board, and we need a strong presence in South Africa because most tourists come via South Africa,” he said.
“We congratulate them for taking this bold step, I am hopeful that this time around it will work,” the ZCT boss said. Kariba, which has the advantage of being the world’s second largest man-made lake, has had no reliable connecting flights from Harare since 1996 when arrivals started declining.
Following violent land invasions in 2000, the industry slipped into a coma as international media spotlight centred on the violence and economic decline in Zimbabwe, which further dented arrivals. Recently, the industry has been recovering, but Kariba has remained in the doldrums.
Hotels and safari lodges in the resort town, including Lake View Inn, Cutty Sark and Kariba Breezes, have collapsed because of poor tourist traffic. Many more have been battling to survive. The luxury cruising sector has also been paralysed. During a tour of Kariba recently, and on several previous visits, the Financial Gazette’s Companies & Markets (C&M) observed that houseboats at the resort’s main Andora Habour have been grounded due to declining business.
There have been several other reasons for the slide in tourist arrivals, such as poor destination marketing by the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority, lack of resources to market the country and counter the effects of a decade of bad publicity and fatigue on the domestic tourism market.
In February, an executive with one of the leading tour operators told C&M that lack of connectivity was affecting operations. Chris Chiparaushe, group general manager at Dunhu Ramambo, which operates six houseboats in the resort town and two major Safari Lodges in Selous, warned that the industry was in danger unless government intervened to improve connectivity.
“When we went to the (tourism) indaba in South Africa last year, there were several groups who said they were willing to come to Kariba,” Chiparaushe said.
“But they said it is expensive to charter flights from Harare to Kariba. We need a regular flight to connect Kariba from Harare so that tourists arriving there fly straight to Kariba. It is less expensive to use scheduled flights,” he said.
“We have been talking to Air Zimbabwe,” he said. “We hope they will make a decision to come back, because the situation is bad.”
While the presence of any other airline on an African destination can make a difference, generally, it has been the national airline’s operations that have been the signature of confidence, both among potential investors and tourists intending to visit any attraction destination.
Lake Kariba offers a combination of fishing, cruising, game drives, holidaying in spacious hotels and a warm climate that attracts tourists from leading source markets worldwide.
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