Zimbabwe’s Sanganai/Hlanganani World Tourism Expo will this year be convened physically in the second capital city of Bulawayo following its suspension for two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Zimbabwe Tourism Authority (ZTA) was quoted by CITE as saying that 250 exhibitors are expected to participate in the expo and 150 of them had already confirmed their participation.
“The dates have been confirmed from the 13th to the 15th of October and I am very excited that we are meeting physically, the last time we met physically was in 2019 and the Covid-19 pandemic did set in and we were not able to meet physically,” said ZTA chief executive Winnie Muchanyuka.
“We see that the numbers of International visitors coming to Zimbabwe are rising steadily but what is more exciting for me is the contribution that domestic tourism has made to the industry and has really kept us afloat as we waited for International travellers to start coming back and riding on domestic tourism is meetings, conferences, events and incentives and that has shown very positive results in the market.”
She said some International exhibitors are coming through from Rwanda, South Africa, Zambia, Botswana and Malawi.
Meanwhile, ZTA head of corporate affairs Godfrey Koti said the pandemic had a serious impact on the country’s tourism revenue.
“In 2020 our quantified loss was around a billion dollars in terms of financial receipts, we only made $359 million during that period and that also opened up a little bit, so the total loss was about $1.3 billion between the two years in terms of expected revenue,” he said.
“In terms of tourists receipts, in 2019 we had closed the year on 2.3 million receipts as far as tourists are concerned and in 2021 we received about 600 000 visitors only, so we are definitely positioning Zimbabwe through the Sanganai/Hlanganani tourism expo.”
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