Magical Kenya Travel Expo a great success again

MAGICAL KENYA EXHIBITION EXCEEDS EXPECTATIONS

The Kenya Tourist Board, aka Magical Kenya, held its annual tourism exhibition last weekend, and inspite of a challenging economic environment visitor numbers exceeded those of past years, with crowds mobbing the stands in particular on Saturday.

KTB’s #TembeaKenya campaign, aimed to raise interest levels in domestic travel, is in part at least credited with the success of the Magical Kenya Exhibition 2012. Under the twitter hashtag #TembeaKenya have a number of sponsored trips taken place, offered jointly by Kenya Wildlife Service and the Kenya Tourist Board, inviting some of Kenya’s best known bloggers and Tweeps to travel across the country and file a daily log of events, experiences and sights – the latter via uploaded pictures to Twitter and their Facebook pages, where thousands upon thousands of their followers then can have a virtual safari of sorts, before eventually embarking on following the original footsteps and see the rich attractions and beauty of Kenya themselves.

Several exhibitors expressed satisfaction with the level of interest from the public. Domestic travel has over the past few years grown significantly, now providing a second backbone for lodges, safari camps and beach resorts besides the foreign tourists, and with elections coming up in March next year, and the anticipated slow down in foreign arrivals towards that date and beyond, travelers from within Kenya and the wider region are expected to sustain viable occupancies for the hospitality industry.

Kenya has therefore in recent months ran campaigns across the East African Community to promote travel to the country and see the national parks and beaches, with regional airlines also stepping up their own marketing of flights to for instance Mombasa, now served by both RwandAir and Air Uganda nonstop several times a week. Visit www.magicalkenya.com or www.kws.go.ke to find information on all the tourist attractions and all the 23 national parks, the 28 national reserves, the 4 marine national parks, the 6 marine national reserves and the 4 national sanctuaries, besides a growing number of privately owned and managed conservancies and game sanctuaries. Watch this space.