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Tourism: Arusha gets new hotels

Tourist figures in Tanzania may have been down by ten per cent in the first ten months of 2009, but new hotels are going up all over Arusha, the centre of the northern safari circuit, the gateway to the Serengeti Park, the Ngorongoro Crater, Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru.

It is estimated that Arusha accounts for some 70 per cent of the country’s tourist trade which even in a bad year is responsible for about 25 per cent of the country’s foreign earnings.

To give the town an extra boost abroad the country’s president Jakaya Kikwete recently opened one of its new hotels, Snow Crest, on the Arusha-Moshi road. In addition to 83 bedrooms the hotel also has a conference facility (with the Obama and Clinton conference rooms) that can seat 150 people.

In the centre of town the multi-storey Palace Hotel on the junction of Boma and Makongoro Road is to be completed later in 2010. Another hotel, the 14-storey Parrot Hotel, is going up in a less salubrious area, but is nonetheless strategically placed near the main stadium and bus station; visible from all over the city, it will be one of the tallest buildings in the country when it is completed.

Corridor Springs, a new complex owned by the Lutheran Church, which has considerable historic and business interests in Arusha, was completed in 2008 on the Old Moshi Road and hosted the prestigious Commonwealth Parliamentary Association conference in October 2009. Next door the super-luxury Kibo Palace has built a new extension. Two other hotels, the Mt Meru and the Hotel 77, among the oldest in town, are also due for renovation.

Three years ago Arusha only had 2,000 rooms for tourists; now there are over 4,000 between hotels and safari lodges.

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