HOTEL GRADING DEADLINE NOW PUSHED TO MID 2016
(Posted 20th July 2014)
‘Noble ideals but completely lacking focus, urgency and funding’ was the instant response to a question asked when news emerged that the East African Community has now pushed the completion date of the slow to start hotel grading and classification exercise yet further away to June 2016.
While the guidelines for grading and classification were completed many years years ago by a panel of experts drawn in by the EAC Secretariat to develop a suitable catalogue of criteria befitting all 5 member states, has the implementation stuttered and misfired several times.
In Uganda has the exercise at long last started some three months ago but less than 50 hotels have todate been graded, all in Kampala and its immediate environs and none further upcountry. In Kenya is the exercise still to kick off, the delay largely attributed to the disorganization at government level through the creation of largely dysfunctional parastatals under the current tourism act, something harshly criticized by many stakeholders who want to see a strong tourism authority put into place, merging all the present parastatals under the leadership of the Kenya Tourism Board, instead of the present fragmentation.
Rwanda has been grading hotels and other service providers but at an admittedly slower pace than was initially foreseen and in Burundi the exercise, like in Kenya, still has to kick off.
Tanzania in contrast has been progressing the grading at a more steady pace, presently leading in the region, but only when all 5 countries have completed their internal work will the common criteria used to award star ratings kick in, giving visitors to the region for the first time a fair comparison of hotel standards.
In Uganda there are several cases known where hotels have blatantly awarded themselves 5 or 4 stars, leaving guests to wonder who came up with such misleading advertising, when they encounter deficiencies in service and comfort levels, having trusted that the stars displayed would in fact reflect reality and not ambition or self-aggrandizement.
The three ‘Northern Corridor’ countries, aka the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ in fact are under pressure to complete the exercise expeditiously as their policy to now advertise at the main global tourism trade fairs under one combined stand will undoubtedly require that service and comfort levels will inevitably be compared when tourists set out on a safari covering Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, and widely differing standards will cast a cloud over efforts to promote and market the three at the same level.
Governments in the region, apart from Rwanda which allocates according to one stakeholder in Kigali ‘sufficient resources, though of course it could be even better’, have been known to shortchange the sector vis a vis funding with lip service constantly outranking reality when it comes to the allocation of funds for tourism marketing and administrative functions. An example is the announcement in Nairobi several months ago that a further 200 million Kenya Shillings would be injected into tourism marketing but according to information received during the week, this money has yet to reach KTB’s accounts, and as the commitment was made in the now past financial year there is growing doubt that this will ever materialize.
Watch this space for regular news updates covering the tourism industry across the East African Community and the wider Eastern African region.
