Assessment of tourism industry in Gondar City, Ethiopia

Abstract

As a service sector, tourism played a significant role in changing the image of a country, improving and facilitating economic growth and development. The tourism sector in Ethiopia is at its early stage. It has become necessary to pay special attention and a thorough analysis of the number of local and international tourist arrival and revenue. Accordingly, the assessment of revenue and tourist flow is important to understand the trend in the tourism industry. Our study area is the Gondar city. We collected the data from 2003 to 2018 on local and international tourist arrival, and revenue generated from Gondar city administrative culture and tourism bureau. Customer satisfaction data on thirteen hotels located in Gondar city was collected from the available online database. We selected ms excel 2007 and SPSS 25 for descriptive statistical analysis and data preparation. Our result shows a relatively increasing trend in both local tourist arrival and revenue except in 2006 and from 2014 to2017. The increase in the number of local and International tourist arrival does not accompanied by simultaneously increase in the revenue. Rather it showed up and downtrends during the study period. Hotel satisfaction concerning cleanness ranked higher for all evaluated hotels. The availability of free internet access ranked low except for one hotel. Though the number of tourist flow to Gondar city seems high, the revenue generated was insignificant. For better competitiveness and to increase the income from tourism industry improvement of tourism service and facilities like transportation infrastructure is required.