According to the list made available to Travelpulse and MICE, tour operators from Nigeria top the list of the awardees for the Top 100 Tour Operators in Africa with 25 tour agencies, Kenya and Tanzania had 7 each Rwanda followed with six while Benin and Togo had five each on the list.
Others are The Gambia, Zimbabwe and Cote D’ ivoire with 4, 3 and 2 tour operators respectively, while Angola, Congo, Malawi, Egypt, Botswana and Senegal emerges with one tour operator each for the list.
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Speaking about the Africa Top 100 Tour Operators, the Founding member of the #TeamAfrica, Mr. Ikechi Uko, who is also the Organiser of Akwaaba African Travel Market expressed his excitement about the awards as he also shed light on the award for the Africa Top 100 Tour Operators. In his words, “Last year we celebrated the awards of the Africa Travel 100 Women at the 13th Akwaaba Travel Market.
“Our vision is to stimulate Intra Africa Tourism. We need to get at least 10% of Africans to travel within Africa. This can only work with the support of Tour Operators. We are going a step further this year to recognize and celebrate the core professional outbound Tour Operators who are at the fore of attracting and moving Africans outside their own countries to explore the abundance of the beauties of our Africa. Africa remains a great goldmine whose tourism potentials remain unmatched and untapped.
“Africa is a continent of Over 1 billion people but receives only 6% of the global tourist Arrivals. As the middle class and number of Travellers increase there is a need to organize the Tourism and Travel landscape by growing scale. Some organisations have global link operations but most operators are still small and limited to their countries. There is a need to organise the tour operators on a larger scale across countries
“To this end Akwaaba African Travel market is pulling together all major out bound Tour Operators in Africa to a summit in Lagos on September 10. This summit will enable players from different countries to build partnership and explore new opportunities to grow.
“The Travel Market will also host Africa tour operators’ conference with theme “The Role of DMCs and DMOs in Sustainable Destination Marketing in Africa considering sub –topics which include What are the Challenges? Should it be competition or cooperation? What are the effective models and. Who is responsible?” Uko Added
and then