The role of promotional services in enhancing Tanzania competitiveness tourism as an illustrative case

Tanzania tourism sector is among the sector with a great economic growth potential. It provides a substantial amount of foreign exchange earnings and employment. It also stimulates other sectors like agriculture thereby contributing to the economic growth. Its contribution to the gross domestic product is about 18% but this is very minimal compared to country’s potentials of the industry. The nation has yet to exploit this sector’s full potential as a way of making Tanzania’s favored tourist destination tremendously marking of tourist products is an essential element to promote Tanzania’s desirable tourist destination. The infrastructure of marketing of Tanzania tourist products is in place and destined in Tanzania tourist Board and diplomatic mission abroad. The two institutions depend on each other for effective Tanzania tourist attraction promotion. This study investigates into the status of tourist promotion in Tanzania capacity of the two promotion institutions constraints to effective promotion and ways of improving the tourist attractive promotion especially by the Diplomatic mission, Tanzania commercial agents so that Tanzania becomes competitive in the tourist sector. The findings reveal severe capacity problem (budgetary and human resource) also the sector continues to face general deterioration of supportive infrastructure, particularly those related to accessibility reliability of international and land transport as well as poor information technology facilities. The inadequate quality accommodation, high operational costs and a weak linkage between the two tourist attractions promotion institutions were also identified bottlenecks. Policy recommendations aiming at overcoming the identified problems form part of this study. The recommended policy options which relate to improved tourist attractions promotion will complement other efforts by the government of developing and utilizing tourist attractions through improvement in tourist related facilities and services which would boost this sector’s performance tremendously.