This paper investigates the factors affecting international tourism demand for Tanzania.
Tanzania recognises the potential of international tourism in accelerating socio-economic development, particularly as a supplier of foreign exchange, investment and employment.The autoregressive distributed lag approach to cointegration is applied. Local tourism prices, tourist preference, tourist income and the 2001 terror attack in the USA had a significant impact on international tourism demand for Tanzania between 1996 and 2006. The government needs to maintain macroeconomic stability, especially low inflation, if the country is to reap full economic benefits from tourism. To reduce sensitivity to local tourism prices, the tourism providers ought to put more effort into diversifying tourism products away from the universally available ones. For example, packaging a game drive in the same basket as Masaai traditional dance would constitute a unique tourism product. There is also a need to improve customer satisfaction to enhance tourist preference for the Tanzanian experience. In this regard, there is a need to train staff in the tourism industry, improve tourism infrastructure such as roads and hotels, and market Tanzanian tourism products aggressively to the world.
