How to plan a successful tour from scratch | Travel with Mutai

Background of planning a successful tour.

Top world touristic landmarks | Picture courtesy

First and foremost, global travel development is said to be increasingly concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere (i.e Europe & America) while in the Southern Hemisphere the opposite is true (i.e Africa, Asia & the Pacific).

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In the Kenyan context, travel is highly developed to the South of Equator which makes tourism revenues minimal in the North.

Planning therefore aims at spatially distributing the tourist traffic in all Geo-regions with an aim of enhancing travel benefits. This can therefore be used as a tool of de-congesting tourism destinations for better resource conservation and their sustainable utilization without much physical and environmental effects being subjected on the destinations.

O’er and above, many tourism destinations, including Kenya are characterized by an influx of undeveloped resources due to the absence of travel organizations, a crucial sector involved in packaging, and also inadequacy of destination planning effects, for instance, there is over supply of wildlife based resources in upper Eastern and North Kenya while there are minimal efforts to develop travel packages in these areas.

Hence, this has lead to a decrease in the travel demand over the years.

Planning a successful tour can enhance visitor flows if there are product development efforts by the organization sector.

Many distributors have resources but are often inaccessible which makes them reserve minimal tourists than their threshold, for instance, landlocked countries might receive fewer tourists due to limited tourist access which becomes an inhibitant  to tourists coming via water.

Planning a successful tour will help enhance the development of rules that will make it easier to access destinations through the various means and modes of transport.

Kenya as a tourist destination, has many developed routes especially in the beach areas, urban destinations and wildlife based destinations. Though the main challenge of travel development here is the characteristic long distance covered in such routes.

This results to a high cost of transport associated with distance during travel packaging. Therefore, planning a successful tour should be intense to develop subsidiary, short distance routes to destinations in order to minimize cost of travel, enhance accessibility and also development of alternative means to cover long distances.

Planning also aims at equalizing destinations based on tourism packages uniqueness while maximizing travel benefits.

More importantly destinations also have to develop relational ties in order to become competitive.

A destination with homogeneous attractions e.g deserts might be facing a challenge of short arrange stays of tourist due to boredom of homogeneous packages.

Such a destination will relay of nearer countries with different set of resources such as adventured areas, natural ecosystems/ forests/ lakes in order to diversify tourist experienced this is likely to extend tourist stays in a destination.

Therefore, planning a successful tour inter-links destinations with proximity destinations in order to create diverse tourist experiences.

Generally, there are few efforts committed by ministries of tourism & destination managers in matters undertaking tour planning in Kenya. Travel routes have been increasingly developed without basic infrastructure, visitor amenities & diverse travel packages for consumption.

While successful tour planning is seen as an important strategy of increasing tourist flows in a destination, it does not fully command increase in demand without proper product development initiatives by tour operators in destination.

Therefore, our focus will be on the development of travel routes and their integration with essential tourism infrastructure, amenities & destinations. This will be largely based on geographical characteristics of an area – in relation to location, distance, proximity, interconnectivity & position to international travel trade (whether along  great circle routes or not).

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