Hotels In Rwanda Face Stiff Competition From Airbnd

Usually, prior to setting off for the actual trip to a destination it is important to know if indeed there are available accommodation options for your overnight stay throughout the scheduled time in your travel plan. Like other destinations, Rwanda features a wide range of accommodation options most of which include the hotels for visitors to spend their night while on a safari holiday.

Hotels like most other accommodation options come at a cost. Whereas the cheapest hotel in Rwanda may go at $70 that is approximately Rwf 50000, the properties that are advertised on Airbnb even go at $25 each night a reason most tourists have opted it to hotels. About 300 residents in Kigali have turned their houses and apartments into rentals on the Airbnb platform-an international marketplace for rental accommodation facilities which is growing very fast compared to the traditional hotel model.

The marketing platform permits ordinary people to rent out additional space in their homes to tourists. As a result, about 300 residents in Kigali have become beneficiaries of this platform and this represents over 170 homes. In most cases, the properties that are available on the platform tend to be cheaper than the hotels thus most tourists and visitors get attracted to them.

To most hotel operators, the platform is entirely driving them into an unfair competition the fact that it isn’t taxed or even regulated making it the cheapest and challenging for hotels to compete favorably. Besides, it is also believed that the platform may pose consequences on the image of the hotel sector in Rwanda especially for cases of poor service delivery.

Concerns further rose up when the hospitality and the tourism setups in Rwanda were urged by the Rwanda Development Board to apply for licensing and grading based on the 2014 tourism law that was gazetted in October 2016. Around June 2018, licensed hotel owners in Rwanda had reached up to 212 from the mere 67 in October in 2017. However, Airbnb is a new marketing strategy in Rwanda. The strategy is said to be not just cheaper but also very flexible something that most tourists and visitors don’t find in hotels and already established hotel owners who pose standard policies.

In conclusion, hotels are some of the accommodation options where tourists on safari to Rwanda and Africa at large do spend their night. Availability of accommodation at a destination like Rwanda makes it easier for visitors to enjoy their vacation and make it memorable.