The Gambian Tourist Value Chain and Prospects for Pro-Poor Tourism

Tourism in The Gambia: International ‘Best Practice’ in Poverty Reduction & Pro-Poor Growth Through Tourism
Draft Report (Friday 22 nd December 2006)
The Gambia (and some of these benefits ‘leak’ out of the country through imports of food,
beverages, labour and the repatriation of profits). So, as a mechanism for increasing the
value of tourism to The Gambia, upmarket packages are not as effective as our intuition
may suggest.
In addition to the suggestion that upmarket packages lead to more expenditure on items
that will not impact strongly on the poor, our analysis suggests upmarket packages fail to
increase expenditure on items that are inherently pro-poor.
Figure 15:
Average out-of-pocket spending per person per day in Dalasi
2500
Average out-of-pocket
expenditure per person per
day (Dalasi)
2000
1500
1000
500
0
1* 2** 3*** 4**** 5*****
Standard of accommodation
Package
All Tourists
Source: The Gambia Tourism Development Master Plan Technical Report No.3 Visitor Survey at Banjul Airport
Almost 90% of tourists to The Gambia stay in two to four star hotels and the very similar
out-of-pocket expenditure by all types of tourist across all standards of accommodation is
striking (the small number of respondents using 1 and 5 star accommodation have
generated average figures with unreliably high variances). As it is this discretionary
expenditure that has the strongest pro-poor impacts, these figures suggest that a strategy
of encouraging upmarket packages will have a limited impact on the poor. This finding
reinforces the recent similar findings from South East Asia.
The importance of discretionary spending on the pro-poor impact of tourism in The Gambia
should also encourage a healthy scepticism to the presentation of All-Inclusive resorts as
necessarily being positive for Gambian tourism.
Interestingly, this analysis questions the common perception that package tourists benefit
the economy less than independent travellers. The average daily out-of-pocket expenditure
of package and independent tourists in the 2004 visitor survey was £25 (D1,403) and £32
(D1,849) respectively. However, a quarter of independent travellers’ daily spend is
absorbed by accommodation costs – which package tourists have paid in advance – leaving
very similar expenditure on other items of pro-poor discretionary spending. Targeting
independent travellers successfully would be one way of reducing hotel dependencies on
tour operators, and this could be coupled with marketing strategies such as those suggested
in Section 6.4.
This suggests that attracting more upmarket visitors is more likely to benefit international
tour operators and hotel owners than the poor. In addition, a strategy to encourage a more
up-market tourist product is likely to necessitate corresponding enhancements to the
tourist infrastructure. Perhaps reflecting the modest standard of current Gambian tourism,
and hence modest expectations of tourists themselves, there is evidence of wide-spread
satisfaction with current tourist infrastructure. Visitor surveys suggest that only transport
and shopping in The Gambia fail to be rated highly be tourists. A danger inherent to an
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