Arrivals throng KIA as Greece climbs the ladder

Moshi. Greece is steadily taking its place as a key tourist source market for Tanzania.

This was evident at the weekend as 54 visitors from the Mediterranean country landed at the Kilimanjaro International Airport (KIA) now surging with visitors.

KIA managing director Christine Mwakatobe said Tanzania is now becoming a preferred destination for tourists from Greece.

She said as she received the visitors that the airport was upgrading its facilities to cope with the increasing number of leisure travellers.

"There is a surge of foreign travellers landing at KIA in both scheduled flights and charter planes,” she told journalists.

Ms Mwakatobe said it was encouraging that Tanzania has started to receive tourists from Greece as the country is reckoned for a large number of outbound travellers.

According to statistics, the number of outbound travellers from the country on the Mediterranean Sea totalled around 5.1million last year.

Greece is ranked 25th among 140 countries in the World Economic Forum's (WEF) 2019 Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index.

By last year, the United States recorded the highest number of arrivals of tourists to Tanzania numbering 100,600.

The US, the world's largest economy, was followed by France (100,371), Germany (67,718), the United Kingdom (60,116) and Poland (46,431).

Kenya is leading for arrivals from Africa. They were (166,324) Burundi (100,851), Zambia (46,787), Malawi (44,438) and Rwanda (44,288).

Tourist arrivals from the top 10 countries out of 214 tourist source markets, account for 53 percent of all arrivals.

And according to the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics, the top six source markets of tourists from outside Africa and their numbers in brackets between January and February, 2023, were France (25,837), Italy (18,556), United States of America (16,567), Germany (15,705), Poland (12,369) and United Kingdom (10,657).

Meanwhile, the top six source markets from Africa were Kenya (29,615), Burundi (16,832), Rwanda (7,627), Malawi (6,563), Uganda (6,511) and South Africa (5,196).

The majority of international visitors (263,934) to Tanzania came for leisure and holidays accounting for 90.7 percent; followed by those who came to visiting friends and relatives (16,307) accounting for 5.6 percent.

Other purposes were visitors in transit to other countries were 6,035, accounting for 2.1 percent and business visitors were 3,418, accounting for 1.2 percent.

According to the Tanzania National Business Council (TNBC), Europe traditionally accounts for the largest share of arrivals to Tanzania.

Europe, with the top five tourist source market for Tanzania, is followed by Asia and the Pacific, the Americas, Africa, and the Middle East.

TNBC forecast that given the fast recovery of the sector, the share of tourism in the country’s GDP will reach 19.5 percent in 2025/26.

Ms Mwakatobe said arrivals from new found Greece market would boost the number of travellers landing at KIA.

She said the number of arrivals at the airport had surged to 927,000 by the end of the 2022/23 financial year.

Lately, the airport has seen large groups of travellers landing in chartered flights, a sign of increased marketing of the country's attractions.

Another airport official Manasse Kidaman said there was an increased use of small charter planes to the remote sides from KIA.

This, he said, signals a boost to the local aviation sector which were impacted by Covid-19 pandemic a few years ago.

KIA, located midway between Arusha and Moshi, was recently described as an airport to watch in the East Africa given the growth of passengers using it.

During last year (2022), the facility recorded the highest growth in the number of passengers being a 64 percent increase and third in the EA region.

It was placed behind Entebbe International Airport of Uganda and Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA), which recorded increases of 66.02 and 65.24 percent, respectively.

During the period under review, the number of passengers who passed through KIA jumped from 503,000 to 825,000, climbing further to 927,000 by June 30th this year.