The impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the EAC tourism and hospitality industry

Abstract

Worldwide, the COVID-19 epidemic has impacted all economies. The study examines the impact of the pandemic on the tourism and hospitality industry in East African Community member nations. This study is a systematic review of Covid19’s influence on the tourist and hospitality industries. The analysis is based on 54 publications collected from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The current study was motivated by an extensive review of literature. According to these studies, the spread of COVID-19 disease to workers in the tourism industry has put the sector in jeopardy; travel restrictions and tourism guidance have made tourism and hospitality industry suffer from severe reduction of revenues. All these studies however do not clarify how, the pandemic has impacted tourism and hospitality industry in terms of national park visitors, hotel occupancy, and unemployment in particular. Therefore, the current study assesses the impact of COVID-19’s on tourism and hospitality in the EAC Partner States by using such indicators as the number of international tourists, receipts and tourism jobs generated, visitors to the parks and the rates of hotel occupancy. The study’s findings show that the EAC Partner States lost USD 4.8 billion in foreign tourist earnings and two million jobs in the tourism sector due to COVID-19. The numbers of visitors to the National parks decreased by 65 percent, hotels in the region had an average occupancy rate of less than 30 per cent, which had a substantial impact on their operations. The study recommends to actors in tourism destinations, to have pandemic preparedness and risk management plans.