Meetings underway ahead of Air Tanzania's India, China flights

Arusha. Air Tanzania Company Limited’s planned foray into the Asian market following the recent acquisition of a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner calls for aggressive marketing, according to analysts.

A series of meetings aimed at strategising on how to make the first major intercontinental flights by a local airline and boost the flow of tourists are underway.

The first brainstorming meeting, to be coordinated by the Tanzania Tourist Board (TTB) and the national carrier, will take place today in Dar es Salaam. The second is slated for Arusha, the country’s most important tourism hub, in a few weeks’ time.

“The message will be simple. How do we capitalize on the flights to tap the promising tourism source markets?” said the deputy permanent secretary in the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, Mr Aloyce Nzuki.

Speaking here on Tuesday during the Ngorongoro Investment Forum, Mr Nzuki confirmed that the planned flights by ATCL to India and China using the 262-seater Dreamliner would commence in September.

“The two markets are promising, and will significantly increase the number of tourists visiting our country,” he told industry stakeholders based in Arusha, emphasizing the need to ensure the Dreamliner investment was viable.

State-owned ATCL will initially operate direct flights to Mumbai in India and later extend to China, the world’s second biggest economy, which has big potential as one of Tanzania’s major tourist sources.

According to data from the Natural Resources and Tourism ministry, India and China are ranked fifth and 8th as the leading sources of tourists who visited Tanzania in 2017, bringing in 49,909 and 29,224 visitors, respectively.

Dr Nzuki said although TTB had done much of the tourism promotion, this time around it would involve all the players in the industry. “We have to plan road shows together for India and China,” he said.

He admitted, however, that the challenge facing ATCL was on how to make the flights to the two destinations affordable.

Earlier this month, ATCL announced several local and regional flights ahead of plans to launch international flights to India and China.

Regional flights are planned to Bujumbura (Burundi) and Entebbe (Uganda), among destinations to neighbouring countries. Currently the national carrier’s only flight outside Tanzania is to the Comoros.

ATCL’s domestic market share had gone up to 20 per cent by May, this year, from a mere 2.5 per cent in October 2016 when it embarked on a recovery programme.

By last year, it had more than quadrupled to 14.4 per cent,thanks to deliberate efforts to turn around the national carrier which was crippled by huge debts and mismanagement.

Monthly revenue collections increased from an average of Sh.100 million a month in October 2016 when the recovery plan was operationalised to Sh. 4.5 billion earnings a month now.