TITLE: New Frontiers in Hospitality and Tourism Management in Africa
Edited by Michael Z. Ngoasong, Ogechi Adeola, Albert N. Kimbu and Robert E. Hinson Springer Nature, Switzerland AG, 2021, 278 pp
For many centuries, the political economy and socio-cultural life of Africa have included hospitality and tourism (H&T). Africa has unique demographic and sociological characteristics but since the year 2000, the H&T sector has grown significantly, making Africa an important player in the world’s tourist industry. This has been fuelled by a number of factors, including the continent’s rich and diverse tourism products, increasingly business-friendly government policies, a shift in how the world views Africa as a travel destination, ICTs and digitisaton, and the growth of businesses involved in both commercial and social H&T in Africa. The 278-page book is well-structured into sixteen chapters and is the first of its kind to offer a management viewpoint to the whole historical, present and geographical breadth of the H&T landscape of Africa.
In Chapter 1, Ngoasong et al. provided an in-depth snapshot of contemporary management practices applied within the H&T landscape of Africa. Key management themes within communities and public and private sector organisations are discussed and analysed using both western and African management theories and concepts as the foundation for the various chapters, allowing for a thorough (re)examination and understanding of management-related challenges within Africa’s H&T industries. Additionally, each of the carefully chosen chapters considers related managerial consequences and offers potential suggestions that, if adopted by the stakeholders, might improve their operations. Current discussions and arguments on the growth of tourism in Africa have seldom ever given the management aspect any significant consideration.
Reflecting on the past, prospects and policy implications of managing tourism for economic development in Africa, Adeniyi and Folarin in the chapter 2 of the book discovered that the development of the tourism sector in Africa depends more on the realisation of tourism as an alternative source of development by African governments. They argued that being a colonial settler society could provide a leverage for the development of the sector as evident in Kenya. However, the study also provided some evidences to show that being a colonial settler is not enough condition, given the competitive nature of the global tourism market. Hence, government’s commitment toward the development of the sector via initiation of relevant policies and reforms is equally crucial.
Ajeyalemi and Olarewaju’s discussion on destination personality as predictor of symbolic consumption in Nigeria’s Tourism Industry in chapter 3 proffers solutions to attracting prospective tourists, with a view to increasing patronage, loyalty and recommendation. They argue, for instance, that Africa can benefit from a more reflective understanding of the tourism industry. They further argued that despite the continent’s tourism endowments, the tourism sector is still underdeveloped and underutilised. They opined, however, that despite this obstacle, the narrative could be changed if the stakeholders – including heads of governments and tourist destination managers – applied coordinated effort to access its enormous potential. Consistent economic growth through greater spending may be ensured if the value connected with the rise of tourism in Africa is more understood through an awareness of the distinctive personalities of its many destinations.
Following from the third chapter, Zhou – in chapter 4 – analyses the prospects of the southern Africa region’s transformation into a formidable MICE (meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions) destination. This is as a result of the region’s opportunity to host high profile events, notably the FIFA 2010 World Cup, United Nations World Tourism Organisation’s (UNWTO) General Assembly, Kasane Wildlife Conference, and Victoria Falls’ United Nations (UN) Conference on Wildlife Economy.
The author alluded the gains of tourism in the region to the creation of a diversified portfolio of tourism offerings and a concerted efforts at developing a MICE tourism which would increase tourist numbers and receipt. To achieve this growth and place the region among the top global tourist destinations, the author proposed the adoption of international best practices as is done in China and Singapore to attain sustainable practices or green MICE, and reduction in carbon footprints. Again, he proffered the revisit, re-orientation and strengthening the tourism and hospitality training curricular so that it reflects the region’s intent to develop its MICE tourism component. Additionally, he proposed a need to establish a competent industry-led regional MICE body mandated to incorporating the region’s MICE sector into the region’s global Tourism Master Plan, initiating a regional MICE tourism statistical database on the region’s MICE market, and related information critical for forward planning.
Though there is a burgeoning amount of literature on the application of event portfolios, majority of these research concentrate on studying a single (large-mega-scale) events, while there are some emerging studies focusing on small-scale events. The focus on the small-scale events shows the need to secure long-term, sustainable tourism benefits in the form of infrastructure, and human and cultural capital. Hemmonsbey and Tichaawa, in chapter 5, advanced argument for the establishment of a holistic event portfolio. Using the Western Cape in South Africa as a brand, they investigated the current event portfolio of that region to determine whether consideration was given to utilise all-inclusive events to achieve leveraging objectives. They intimated, for instance, that while a comprehensive portfolio of events serves as the strategic tool for event management, it is clear that a broader strategic policy or framework is needed to support the strategic direction of event stakeholders.
The extant literature is replete with empirical evidence of the importance of branding, which includes building confidence in business owners and customers, attracting repeat purchase, and eventually leading to sustained incremental revenues. Under chapter 6, Hinson et al. investigated the dialogic communications potential of the Botswana Trade and Investment Centre website for destination branding. They re-echoed the importance of branding to the success of organisations, especially the tourism destinations. Building a dialogic principle of nations’ trade and investment websites, in the view of the authors, would create the needed awareness of the rich media potential of a nation’s investment and trade website to create awareness and influence destination image and trade and investment intention based on the dialogic potential of the site. Again, the authors aver that a trade and investment website’s design can benefit from the application of dialogic communication principles, media richness theory and marketing principles.
Moving the discussion on destination branding further, Matiza situated his discourse from destination branding to nation or country branding in chapter 7. The dichotomy between destination brands and nation brands has been carefully captured by the author. According to the author, a nation brand is primarily connected to image formation through tourism-specific heuristic cues like attractions and facilities whereas a destination brand is connected to image formation through a broad multi-dimensional spectrum of beliefs, perceptions or stereotypes based on macro-level heuristic cues associated with a country/nation like governance, culture and export products. To the author, both nation branding and destination branding offer some benefits to the African continent. Nation branding is critical to the development and growth of tourism on the African continent whereas tourism offers Africa and its nations a unique opportunity to brand themselves better. Thus, nation branding and tourism have some symbiotic relationship, implying that the nation brand may be considered as a destination marketing axiom for African tourism.
Chapter 8 illustrates selected narratives about developments in the supply chain field and proceeds to identify and discuss the derived developments in hospitality and tourism sector in Africa. The narratives aim to highlight the motivating factors that accelerate the advancement in hospitality and tourism. The narratives are chosen from different practices in supply chain history. The narratives are extended expressly to show how the hospitality and tourist industries in sub-Saharan Africa are becoming more sophisticated and all-encompassing as well as how they are connected through the supply chain. In order to do this, the authors – Sifolo and Henama – recognised that integrating IT into the process of purchasing, selling, transferring or exchanging goods and services over the Internet might maximise supply chain potential in the hospitality and tourism sector in Africa. They cited, for instance, the case of Airbnb, where disruption in tourism accommodation were created using IT to create a new supply chain mechanism. The authors, thus, aver that for African countries to exploit the IT and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, access to fibre and free-Wifi must be delivered by the state to ease communication and support business transactions.
Under chapter 9, Novikova examined the implication of the sharing economy on the hospitality industry in Africa. The sharing economy, according to the author, provides both opportunities as well as some challenges in the hospitality industry. The opportunities provided by the sharing economy, according to the author, are economic, social and environmental in nature. He explained the economic opportunities as being able to generate employment and improve the economic status of the participants. According to the author, social factors have the power to highlight a sense of community and forge ties that otherwise would not have been feasible. The author concluded by explaining that resource sharing could, at the very least, lessen the environmental impact of numerous human activities. On the other hand, the author claims that the challenges posed by the sharing economy on travel destinations include the need for regulation, with worries ranging from taxation to quality and safety assurance, the impact of the sharing economy segment on conventional lodging providers, and the need to support broader inclusion of potential hosts by removing access barriers like low digital literacy as well as the rise in housing prices and rents.
Ngoasong and Jafari, in chapter 10, examined the challenges faced by microentrepreneurs from low-income urban populations in Freetown (Sierra Leone), and Agadir (Morocco) as well as their interactions with government organisations and the contribution of their businesses to the growth of the tourism industry. These people engage in subsistence trading, with any excess being used largely to meet household needs for food and other essentials in order to keep up future vending activity. Investigating these businesses is crucial because they are prevalent throughout the African continent and not just in the afore-mentioned nations. In a succinct conclusion, the authors urge governments to support these tourism microentrepreneurs in a way that promotes tourism development in Africa.
According to Njinyah and Pendati, there isn’t much information available about the tourist and hospitality industries in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in Cameroon. As such, they examined the use of government programmes promoting women-owned SMEs in the Cameroonian hotel industry, drawing on the institutional theory. They claim that while some business owners are aware of some existing policies, most of them do not use them; and for those who do, the results have not been as anticipated when identifying the potentials and benefits the sector can provide to the economy. The authors went on to suggest further explanations for this lack of awareness including knowledge gaps and a failure to apply newly obtained information about how to access these policies and lack of sensitisation from government; as for usage, the reasons relate to a lack of government training, the bureaucracy involved in accessing them, and a fear of government intrusion through taxes.
In chapter 12, Nyikana et al. bemoaned the failure of African destinations in integrating sports tourism into their overall developmental, destination management and marketing plans and operations. Using Cameroon as a case study, the authors examined how sports can be used to develop tourism in different localities/regions in Cameroon. While there seems to be an abundance of opportunities for leveraging sports in order to boost domestic tourism, there are some bottlenecks inhibiting the opportunities sports present. Some of the obstacles, according to the authors, included the lack of relevant investments in infrastructure, lack of an enabling environment, and the lack of aligned and coordinated efforts between tourism and sports officials, resulting in the lack of a comprehensive and integrated development strategy to develop and manage the country’s domestic tourism, and thereby increase its contributions to local social and economic development in the country. The authors suggested that additional efforts should be made to manage and promote sports as a catalyst for local growth, marketing and domestic travel.
Mackenzi et al. assessed the environmental and CSR practices of business establishments in Botswana’s tourism industry. The authors claimed that Botswana’s tourism sector advances sustainable tourism to protect its natural resources and environment. It is refreshing to note that the government of Botswana, through the Botswana Tourism Organisation (BTO), has put in place a number of institutional frameworks, which include the voluntary Botswana Ecotourism Certification System (BECS) and other frameworks like the National Ecotourism Strategy (NES), to adopt environmental management practices, ecotourism and sustainable tourism to alleviate poverty, educate, and to protect the environment. The authors, therefore, implored the government to develop a CSR policy that guides all CSR activities by tourism establishments in the country as well as strengthen the relationship between businesses and communities to aid in implementing best CSR practices.
Integrating concepts from MI and ANT, Siakwah and Musavengane – in chapter 14 – analysed how actors, institutions and discourses are innovatively recruited to tourism development in community-based tourism in Ghana and South Africa. Despite the depth of knowledge on community-based natural resources in Africa, ranging from human-wildlife conflict, benefit sharing, race, and class in resource control, there appear scant literature on actor network theory (ANT) and management innovation (MI) approaches in community-based tourism (CBT) that promote sustainable development, which this chapter sought to explore. The authors aver that community-based tourism can be managed innovatively by recruiting diverse actors to promote marketing, governance and infrastructure development in the tourism space.
In an expansive thought-provoking probe, Okafor et al. assessed the effects regional trade agreements have on international tourist flows in the Middle East and Africa, considering the fact that empirical studies found that regional trade integration yields trade gains for participating countries, but little attention has been devoted to their impact on international tourist flows within SSA and MENA. It is the belief of the authors that membership in an RTA reflects a greater degree of global economic integration, which lowers the transaction costs associated with international tourism and improves the attractiveness of destination countries in the SSA and MENA regions. However, the advent of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has led many countries to place restrictions on international travel, impacting more than 90 percent of the global population which brought international tourism to a standstill (Gössling, Scott & Hall, 2021).
The final chapter is dedicated to reflecting on some of the key lessons learnt in this book concerning the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its aftershocks on the hospitality and tourism industries. The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to a large extent a degree of uncertainty and unprecedented demands on available national, organisational and individual resources needed for survival.
The chapters offer insightful theoretical perspectives along with empirical evidence from different developing African countries. The collection demonstrates the editors’ tireless effort in assembling experienced scholars to make substantial contributions to the dynamic and important field of tourism, hospitality, and event management. The logical flow and clarity, coupled with contributors’ attention to elucidating issues in detail makes reading enjoyable and comprehensible to average readers. It undoubtedly makes valuable contributions to theory and practice given its in-depth analysis of contemporary issues in hospitality and tourism management. The compendium is, thus, an important resource for academics, policy-makers, tourism operators and students interested in tourism and hospitality management issues in developing countries, particularly Africa.
References
Gössling, S., Scott, D., & Hall, C.M. (2021). Pandemics, tourism and global change: a rapid assessment of COVID-19. J Sustain Tour 29(1):1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2020.1758708
Masud Ibrahim
Department of Management Studies
Akenten Appiah-Menka University of Skills Training
And Entrepreneurial Development
