By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 12
HPP II names tourism among the sectors COVID flattened. The harder question is what a recovery plan can do for an industry that runs on foreign arrivals.
When HPP II lists the sectors it wants to revive, tourism sits near the top of the casualty list. The plan groups tourism, hospitality and aviation among the mass-employment industries that drought and the pandemic hit hardest, and it launched into a recovery Namibia could not yet see. The N$7.5 billion (about US$500 million) tourism economy it inherited had spent 2020 close to standstill, its lodges and hotels emptied by border closures and lost arrivals.
A sector waiting on other countries
The difficulty for any recovery plan is that Namibian tourism’s fortunes are decided elsewhere. Most visitors come from Germany, the United Kingdom and South Africa, all harder hit by the pandemic than Namibia, and until those markets reopened no domestic measure could refill the country’s parks and lodges. A plan can mend roads and market destinations; it cannot reopen a foreign border.
Namibia can ready the welcome, but the arrival is decided in Frankfurt, London and Johannesburg.
What the plan can actually offer
What HPP II can do is treat tourism as economic infrastructure worth protecting: keeping the assets – the Etosha and Sossusvlei circuit, the guides and the lodges – intact through the lean period, and folding the sector into its wider push on jobs and investment. The realistic near-term play is resilience and the domestic market, holding the industry together until its foreign visitors return.
The plan’s job is to keep tourism alive until the arrivals it cannot summon come back.
For a lodge owner, operator or tourism investor, HPP II offers recognition and a recovery agenda, but no shortcut around the source markets that drive the business. The decision it leaves is whether to hold on through a foreign-demand slump the plan cannot fix, or reshape toward the domestic visitors it can actually reach.
Sources: The Namibian; Tourism sector and destinations (Namibia Trade Network); The negative impact of COVID-19 on Namibian tourism (New Era)
