NAIROBI: George Simiyu was driving for a Kenyan minister when he was laid off in 2004, leaving his family without a reliable source of income. A year later, he picked up a job ferrying tourists from Nairobi’s international airport to a local hotel and guiding them on excursions through Nairobi National Park.
“I lost my job and everything for me stopped,” he said outside the airport, recalling how he had to take his children out of school and struggled to support his elderly parents.
“Tourism has helped me a lot ... if tourists stop coming I stop working,” said the 38-year-old father of three.
Simiyu, from Bungoma in western Kenya, is one of tens of thousands benefiting from a boom in tourism in the east African nation, whose safari parks and Indian Ocean coastline have attracted nearly 400,000 tourists so far this year.
Tourism took a dive after Al Qaeda terror attacks on the US embassy in Nairobi in 1998 and the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in Mombasa in 2002.
But the sector is finally recovering thanks largely to a major advertising campaign for the first six months of 2004.
Another factor has been the strength of the South African rand, which appreciated by about 140 per cent against the dollar between 2002 and 2004 before retreating modestly this year — making travel and stay in South Africa more expensive.
Industry leaders also say tourists wary of visiting Asia after the 2004 tsunami are looking again at Kenya.
Kenya says the tourism industry had its best performance in 15 years in 2004, earning it 42.5 billion shillings ($561 million), up from 25.2 billion in 2003. Holidaymakers for the first half of 2005 were up 30.2 percent from the same period in 2004.
One big boost came after the US government revised a travel advisory in May 2004 to recommend its citizens to be vigilant while in Kenya rather than avoid the former British colony.
“After that, there was an immediate increase of US-originated tourism,” Jake Grieves-Cook, chairman of the state-run Kenya Tourist Board (KTB), told Reuters.
Visitors from the United States increased by 50 per cent in the first quarter of 2005, making US visitors the second largest group after tourists from Britain.
As part of its drive to lure visitors, the KTB also hosted hundreds of US- based travel agents and took them around Kenya, famous for the wildebeest migration in the Maasai Mara park and the coral reefs off its coast.
There are other attractions like the elephants of Amboseli and the coastal towns of Lamu and Malindi. The more adventurous can climb up Mount Kenya or go on safari on horseback.
The unprecedented KTB advertising campaign focused on Europe — the mainstay of tourism to Kenya.
Kenya advertised on television and in newspapers, put posters in London’s Underground and on the city’s black cabs.
