DAR ES SALAAM, Oct. 10 (Xinhua) -- Tanzania's public tourism body said on Tuesday it will host an in-door International Tourism Expo, known as the Swahili International Tourism Expo in the east African nation's commercial capital Dar es Salaam.
The three-day tourism expo to be held on Oct.13 has attracted Nigeria, Morocco, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Mauritius, South Africa, Malawi, Ethiopia, Namibia, Zimbabwe and India, said Tanzania Tourist Board (TTB) Managing Director Devota Mdachi.
The expo will be held at the Chinese-built Julius Nyerere International Convention Center (JNICC), she told a news conference.
Mdachi said 150 tourist-related institutions and companies from 13 African countries and 186 tourist agents from across the world will meet their local counterparts and discuss how to promote the industry.
She said the tourist agents will come from India, Ethiopia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and Morocco, adding that after completion of the expo the agents will visit various tourist attractions in Tanzania.
The Swahili International Tourism Expo focuses on inbound and outbound travel business to and within Africa.
The event showcases the travel possibilities in Tanzania - within and beyond the well-known attractions in 16 National Parks, around Mount Kilimanjaro and on the beautiful beaches on the Island of Zanzibar.
Conservation and sustainable tourism, as well as tropical tourism and traveling within East Africa, are additional subjects to be promoted during the expo.
A new report released in June this year rated Tanzania's tourism industry as one of the fastest growing sectors in the east African country with figures showing a surge on tourist arrivals.
The 2016 International Visitors' Exit Survey Report indicated that the number of tourists who visited the country, east Africa's second largest economy, continued to rise.
The report showed that Tanzania hosted at least 1,284,279 tourists in 2016, compared to 1,137,156 in 2015, which was an increase of 12 percent.
The report showed revenues from the tourism industry had been rising year after year with 2.1 billion U.S. dollars in 2016 against 1.9 billion U.S. dollars in 2015.
Tourism is Tanzania's largest foreign exchange earner since 2012, contributing an average of 2 billion U.S. dollars annually, which is equivalent to 25 percent of all exchange earnings, according to government data.
Tourism also contributes to more than 17 percent of the national gross domestic product (GDP), creating more than 1.5 million jobs.
