Seychelles Tourism Board hosts 2019 marketing review meeting ‘2019 an excellent year for tourism in Seychelles,’ says Minister Dogley |15 January 2020

Minister Dogley addressing the gathering (Photo: Louis Toussaint)

The total number of visitors who visited Seychelles in 2019 stands at 384,204 and this represents a 6% increase in visitor numbers, which exceeds the country’s target of 4%.

The Minister for Tourism, Civil Aviation, Ports and Marine, Didier Dogley, shared the news with tourism trade partners and different stakeholders and actors in the tourism industry who had gathered at the Eden Bleu Hotel yesterday morning for the annual tourism marketing review meeting.

Minister Dogley stated that more importantly, according to the Central Bank of Seychelles, we also registered a provisionally 6% growth in revenue.

“This has been achieved following a constant and gradual increase in numbers of visitors and receipt over the past 5 years,” he pointed out.

The marketing meeting yesterday also saw two different video presentations showcasing highlights from all the different markets as well as making a quantitative review of all the markets.

Minister Dogley congratulated everyone who in one way or another have contributed to these great achievements which today we can all be proud of.

“Success does not grow on trees; it takes the right policies, adequate infrastructure, dedicated personnel and expertise in the right quality and quantity, hard work and determination to succeed,” Minister Dogley highlighted.

He went on to note that today, tourism experts in Mauritius and Maldives are openly lauding the Seychelles tourism as the best model in the region.

“Our policies have led to a gradual, continual and sustained growth in both visitor numbers and receipt in revenue,” the minister pointed out.

With regard to the moratorium on construction of large hotels, Minister Dogley said this has enabled the tourism authorities to revisit and clean up a long list of accommodation projects of over 3000 rooms. “Now, we know who are the serious investors and who are not and what measures we need to take to facilitate serious investors and clean up our investment systems,” he highlighted.

He added that it has also provided room to empower Seychellois investors, many of whom have taken the opportunity to invest in small tourism establishments resulting in the majority of rooms being in the hands of locals.

“In 2019 alone we licensed 61 new tourism establishments of fewer than 25 rooms adding a total of 243 additional rooms to our inventory.

“Our policy has always been to ensure that wealth created by the tourism industry benefits the Seychellois population as a whole; I am happy to report that this is clearly happening,” said Minister Dogley.

But although the tourism industry has been performing well in its key markets, Minister Dogley said we should never be complacent. Instead we need to strategically strengthen our marketing capacities to sustain and grow our share in key markets with strong performances while at the same time conduct a detailed analysis of the markets where our performance has been below expectations and design winning strategies.

Challenges and threat to the tourism industry

In terms of challenges Minister Dogley touched on the threats and challenges which take the form of such phenomena as Brexit, the escalating situation in the Gulf where America and Iran have been waging proxy wars for a very long time but where, only very recently, their antagonism has become more direct and potentially lethal.

“These problems are not of our making and we can do very little about them except remain vigilant and mitigate where and when we are able to.”

The minister noted that Seychelles is fortunate to have the services of many fine airlines which have greatly assisted in making Seychelles accessible to a wide range of markets across the globe. Therefore, he noted, the news that Eidelweiss and Air France will only be operating winter schedules is of concern as is the plight of Condor, which has applied for a bridging loan and whose own future performance is destined to affect that of our German market.

Value for money, bad customer experience

Minister Dogley noted that one of the persistent challenges the industry faces is providing value for money to visitors.

“We surely do not need to be reminded that the international tourism arena is a very congested and highly competitive one with tourists now equipped as never before to sniff out the best deals via the plethora of social media and other forums available to them,” he remarked.

He reminded everyone present that news of bad customer experiences and other adverse propaganda is now able to spread like wildfire across the internet, affecting any potential tourist’s decision to travel to Seychelles.

“We must therefore double our efforts to provide value for money and avoid the temptation to adopt the fatal, short-term vision of ripping off our clients.

We must take pains to counter this counter-productive mentality through such campaigns like ‘We Are Tourism’ and find other ways to increase awareness across all segments of the population to the importance of tourism and our reliance upon it,” Minister Dogley told everyone present.

Marie-Anne Lepathy