Tourists Statistics

To say a little about the characteristics of the respondents, let us start from their
nationalities. They are from 22 different countries, which is a good deal of diversity to render
our sample the quality of representativeness. What is more interesting is that major tourist
sending countries have better representation in the study as Germany (18), USA (18), UK
(15), France (11) and Denmark (10) are the top five sending countries involved in the study.
With respect to sex, though sampling was random, fortunately, our sample consists of equal
number of males and females: 70 males, 70 females and 1 unspecified.
In addition, most of
the respondents are either single (44.7%) or married (44%). Still, all of the types of marital
status are represented in the sample. The biggest category of work status in the sample is
that of formally employed tourists (41.1%) while retired (16.3 %) and self-employed (15.6)
tourists are the second and third important groups. More important is probably the income
level. About 30% of the respondents were not willing to indicate their income level. With the
valid data, about 76.5% of the respondents get a monthly disposable income4 of more than
USD 1000 (i.e., USD 12,000 per year) showing that most of them are from a high income
class in the world.
As the motive is basically to see the images of vacation tourists who come to see Ethiopia
for its inherited and created resources, survey was not undertaken at airports rather the
National Museum of Ethiopia was chosen so that only vacation or at least those who have
both the time and interest to visit tourist sites in Ethiopia, including the museum, would be
asked to fill the questionnaires. For that reason, vacation is the motive for 71.6% of the
respondents for visiting Ethiopia. Business takes the next (11.3%) while there is no one who
comes to transit to another country. Note that one expects a better awareness of the
respondents about Ethiopia’s tourist resources since vacation tourists gather a good deal of
information about the place they are going to visit than other forms of tourism movements.
Moreover, the average (mean) length of stay for the respondents is 19.14 days. The mode is
14 days (2 weeks). More importantly, over 90% of the respondents have seen at least half of
their planned sites. Whereas the remaining have not seen at least half or not stated so, care
has been taken to include only those who have seen some major tourist sites outside Addis.

About 10 % of the travellers have changed planned number of days to be spent in Ethiopia.
Of the six tourists who elongated their stay, three of them didn’t explain why, two of them are
interested in tourist sites and needed more time and one of them was a business man who
needed to get more friends. Among the seven tourists who decided to shorten their stays,
‘bad roads’ disappointed two of them and the other two quoted language difficulties as a
problem while three of them didn’t respond to the question.language difficulties as a problem
while three of them didn’t respond to the question.