TOURISM MARKETING PRACTICES, CHALLENGES AND STRATEGY IN ADDIS ABABA: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE TRAVEL AND TOURISM SECTOR

Abstract

The tourism marketing and its development have gained a great attention and have been adopted as a policy in tourism planning by many governments and concerned bodies. Thus, the study aimed to analyze the tourism marketing practices, challenges and strategies in Addis Ababa. This is because Addis Ababa City stands at the very heart of the country possessing around 150 registered cultural heritages. Thus, this study used descriptive research design and distributed 390 questionnaires for local and international tourists, tour operators and employees. Accordingly, the study found that the practices of tourism in Addis Ababa exhibited inferior and insufficient physical facilities, poor positioning strategy, improper usage of technology, unexpanded resource and development activities and legal activities impede tourism marketing in Addis Ababa. The independent test analysis shows that tourists, tour operators and employees responded similar marketing challenges in legal, economic, technology, Sio-cultural, top management, human resource, research and development and resource availability aspects. For this reason, the study recommends that additional policy support can be provided to tourism sectors in Addis Ababa. These include import tax cuts in communication equipment like radio or satellite telephone; camping equipment like convenient tents and providing standard tourist service products like parks, credit provision, market information, training, etc. that needs to reform Ethiopian tourism legal and investment privileges frameworks to create a responsible tourism practice at the first place and currently has become an established area of tourism research and development pertaining in enhancing the current tourism development in the country.