Government through the Ministry of Environment, Climate, Tourism and Hospitality Industry is set to host an investment and tourism marketing conference in Dubai in January.
The conference dubbed Visit Zimbabwe Tourism and Investment Conference will take place on the 14th of January at the Abu Dhabi Hall, Business Connect Centre.
Zimbabwe Tourism Authority (ZTA) on its Twitter handle said the conference is meant to promote destination Zimbabwe to the diaspora community especially UAE and the Gulf Region.
The country is leaving no stone unturned in its quest to make tourism a multi-billion-dollar sector.
Tourism is one of the key pillars for economic revival for the Second Republic together with mining and agriculture.
Writing on Twitter, ZTA said ‘’The Ministry of Tourism will host the Visit Zimbabwe Tourism and Investment Conference on 14 January 2022 in Dubai, a strategic platform to engage with the diaspora market, Gulf Cooperation Council for Business and Leisure Tourism, as well as tourism investment.
‘’The objective includes promoting destination Zimbabwe among the travel trade in the UAE and the Gulf Region, to promote Zimbabwe holiday packages to the diaspora market in UAE and the Gulf Region at large, and to promote tourism investment in Zimbabwe,’’ read the announcement.
Zimbabwe has amazing tourism attractions, but it has been let down by bad country perception due to negative reporting by international media.
On its part, the country has previously failed to do justice in terms of marketing due to poor funding from the treasury. This resulted in the closure of marketing offices in such countries as China.
The Second Republic which came in November of 2017 claims that tourism is at the centre of its heart.
As a way of making its statement clear, the government has allocated about ZW$1.2 billion towards tourism development and promotion in the 2022 national budget.
It has also scrapped duty on the importation of capital equipment such as vehicles for tour operators among others.
However, economic watchers are of the view that while the efforts are noted, they are not enough to take the sector to where it is supposed to be. Hatfield legislator Tapiwa Mashakada is on record calling for more funding to the sector arguing that it is one of the low-hanging fruits.
