More need to make tourists experience local on their holiday

According to Uganda’s burgeoning tourist sector, visitors wind up their holiday in the country returning home with 60% of the money they came with unspent. The main reason is that they cannot find what to spend the money on and even when they spend on a few things, most of these things are not locally made by artisans. This is the reason why artisans from South Africa, Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya have gained more from the visitors than nationals.

Failure to impress them by the local traders is a damning revelation that needs to be solved effectively if the country is to benefit. Planners should be prompted to be more creative and innovative to make the industry more beneficial than it is right now. Creating close connections between the local people and the visitors is a starting point for enhancing a huge potential local experience.

There is more need to sensitize both the local people along the tourists’ corridor on the kinds of things they should do to tap into their interests and money. However, these things should not be the same and should vary from place to place. For those people who stay around the National Parks, they will have to create unique things which complement the visitors’ wildlife experience while those at the border points or at the edge of the parks will have to create things that fit the visitors’ expectation at that point of the journey.

Lucky enough, a new team at the Uganda Tourism Board (UTB) has been setup. This team comes from a private sector and a corporate background different from the old team (civil servant team) which was at the helm for many years.

For this new innovation to become a success, it will take more faces at the Uganda Tourism Board to infuse a new sense of direction to improve the sector. All tour operators and Uganda Wildlife Authority’s stakeholders will have to put their energy in sensitizing the local people on how to enrich the tourists experience and creating the local linkage that will make the industry more sustainable.

Uganda is one of the leading tourist destinations in Africa and it’s blessed with a diverse collection of wildlife, primates including the gorillas of Bwindi and Mgahinga, different bird species, beautiful landscapes and ever-green savannah plains. This is the reason why the country registers an increase in Uganda safaris annually compared to other countries .However, the local people fail to utilize this opportunity due to the inability to impress and tap money from the visitors.

Visitors are fond of buying local standard commodities like craft shoes, bags, huts and many more for remembrance but the local people have failed to produce standard products that can impress the visitors to buy. It’s the foreigners like Kenyans who are gaining more from Uganda’s visitors than the local people. This has forced the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) to setup a team that will sensitize the local people about the different techniques of impressing the visitors.