New grading rules for hotels in East Africa coming
A new classification criteria for hotels and restaurants in East Africa is under review. The review is aimed to standardize services offered by the accommodation facilities in the region.
“Standardisation will be extended to services offered by the tour operators and tour guides,” said Simon Kiarire, the principal tourism officer with the East African Community (EAC) secretariat.
He said here over the weekend that the classification criteria currently in place overlooked services offered by some industry players.
He said this time around, standardization would be applied across the tourism value chain in the region. Mr Kiraie revealed this here early this week when he was addressing a raft of tourism industry players.
That was during the launching of a training in grading and assessing the quality of accommodation, food and beverage services.
The two-month training is jointly coordinated by the EAC secretariat, the National College of Tourism (NCT) and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism. It attracted 14 participants from the private sector and 30 others from the public sector from within the EAC region.
“The goal is to build resiliency, competitiveness and a safe destination for tourists from across the globe by improving the quality of tourism services region wide,” he said.
Under the exercise, experts will be equipped with skills “that will enable them to become the EAC assessors capable of assessing hospitality establishments in all the partner states.”
The Common Classification Criteria for tourism accommodation establishments and restaurants is part of the EAC Tourism Marketing Strategy.
The strategy was approved by the EAC Sectoral Council on Tourism in July 2021. It was adopted by the Council of Ministers in November last year.
Available statistics indicate the region has so far classified a total of 906 hotels with Tanzania leading with 383 establishments.
Tanzania is followed by Kenya ( 215), Rwanda (176) Uganda (81) and 51 hospitality establishments in Burundi.
According to the tourism official, the 107 assessors that the entire region boasts were not enough to classify all tourism outfits.
“Most of the assessors were trained in 2009/10, quite a number of them have either left or cannot offer classification and assessment service,” he explained.
