Tourism African Competitors

Inherited resources, be it natural or cultural, are the primary factors that attract tourists.
These demonstrate a country’s potential for tourism development. An important fact to pay
attention here is that it is usually impossible to create these resources making some
countries like Ethiopia (even when they are poor) always preferred to others as a tourist
destination.

Ethiopia is more attractive than its average African competitors in many of the inherited
resources categories (see Appendix 2. As expected, Ethiopia is well above the African
average in historical sites, heritage and traditional arts. The increase in the mean rank for
historic sites from 3.27 to 4.02 and the narrowing in the disagreement among the
respondents (decrease in standard deviation from 1.031 to .848) show how bad image is
daunting the Ethiopian tourism sector. The problem becomes even serious when one notices
that most of them are vacation tourists who might have tried to read about Ethiopia, heard
from a friend or tourism magazines and decided to come to Ethiopia. However, what they
saw is significantly higher than what they expected. One can imagine how worse the image
would be among the general public in their respective countries. The same is true to heritage
and traditional arts. This has a clearer message: Ethiopia has to do a lot to promote its
historic sites and heritages so as to get more tourists. Tourists ranked Ethiopia slightly lower
than Africa in artistic and architectural features. However they corrected their image over 0.6
points, a significant improvement. In general, it can be concluded that Ethiopia has a very
good potential on man made inherited resources.
When we come to the natural inherited resources, Ethiopia still stands above the African
average, but lower than its rank in historic and cultural resources. This is also expected as
most African countries like Kenya, Tanzania and Morocco have specialized in natural
resources tourism like national parks, wild life and beaches. Ethiopia’s national parks were
rated below African average albeit wider disagreements among the respondents. This image
has also improved 0.5 points though it does not significantly place Ethiopia well above the
African average. This may imply the following:
• Many tourist come to Ethiopia mainly for the historic route and the Omo valley
people. The fact that only 85 respondents are willing to rate Ethiopia on this specific
question supports this argument. As a result, Ethiopia is not much known for its
national parks, leading to a lower rank in Africa. The one that was repeatedly visited
is the Semien Mountains National Park, for it is located in the historic route. But
without going to parks like Awash and Nechisar national parks, a significant
improvement in the ranking might not be expected.

Those who have been to Awash and Nechisar have complaints that they didn’t see
as many wild animals as they envisaged. Instead, some of them have unfortunately
seen camels and cattle in the parks. Hence, the ranking may be the right place
Ethiopia finds itself.
Flora and fauna, attractiveness of climate to tourism, unspoiled nature are the other natural
resources where Ethiopia was ranked slightly above the average African image tourists have
in mind and showed good improvements. Attractiveness of climate to tourism is the item that
had showed a substantial improvement of about 0.9 points after visit. This may be because
of the general thinking that most of Africa is very hot thanks to its location in the tropics, and
Ethiopia is unique owing to its high altitude. It can also be argued that the other two, flora
and fauna and unspoiled nature might also have improved had most respondents gone to
the south. Anyways, the message is clear: Ethiopia is facing formidable competition in
natural resources tourism from other African countries that have an established legacy.
One last but important issue of natural attractions is cleanliness. Unfortunately, Ethiopia was
rated below African average and found as expected.

Created Resources
Created resources include tourism infrastructure, special events, range of available
activities, entertainment and shopping. These are basic determinants of tourist flows to any
country. This is where Ethiopia, according to the tourists, clearly falls below an average
African tourist destination. Even then, except for adventure activities (e. g. rafting, skydiving,
and bungee jumping), tourists’ expectation was significantly lower than their actual
experience stressing the tough work awaiting the Ethiopian tourism sector: promotion.
Eleven of the eighteen items of comparison that are thought to constitute created resources
tourist attractions i.e. existence of amusement/theme parks, night life (e. g. bars, discos,
dancing), water based activities (e. g. swimming, boating, fishing), entertainment (e. g.
theatre, galleries, cinemas), special events/festivals, sport facilities (e. g. golf, tennis),
recreation facilities (e. g. parks, leisure facilities, horse riding), health resorts (like spa),
adventure activities (e. g. rafting, skydiving, bungee jumping), diversity of shopping
experience and nature based activities (e. g. bush walking, bird watching) are rated by only
less than half5 of the participants of the study (see Appendix 3). This may imply a number of
things:
• Tourists didn’t expect Ethiopia to have such resources and never read or searched
about that. And neither are they ready to ask if they exist in Ethiopia.
• They are not interested in those resources (as one tourist explicitly wrote that she is
old and do not enjoy those activities).
Even those who tried to rate Ethiopia on those items have concluded that Ethiopia stands
well below an average African tourist destination. More over, the improvements in the ratings
after visiting are not strong enough to put Ethiopia at least as good as the average African
image they have in mind. Hence, it can be conclude that these factors may be reasons why
Ethiopia attracts less number of tourists than Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and South Africa
who have established a legacy on such activities. With the exception of water-based
activities that Ethiopia can’t organize as efficiently as others for lack of access to the sea6,
all the rest are possible demanding only the attention of the ministry, and more importantly,
private investors.