NAIROBI, Oct. 2 (Xinhua) -- Kenya is looking at Chinese and U.S. tourists in order to boost international arrivals in 2018, a senior government official said on Tuesday.
Najib Balala, cabinet secretary for tourism and wildlife, told a media briefing in the capital of Nairobi that the country received about 1.4 million visitors in 2017.
"We are projecting that increased international arrivals from China and the United States will push total tourist arrivals in 2018 to between 1.7 million and 1.8 million," Balala said.
The introduction of direct flights between New York and Nairobi in October will boost American tourist arrivals into Kenya, Balala said.
He said Kenya has intensified marketing campaigns in China to attract more Chinese tourists, with a goal of more than 100,000 Chinese arrivals a year in the next two years. Last year, about 70,000 Chinese tourists visited Kenya.
China represents a key emerging tourism source market for Kenya that has largely been untapped, Balala said.
"We want Sino-Kenya people-to-people exchanges to reach the level of bilateral cooperation in commerce and investments," he added.
The official said the completion of the Chinese-built Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) that links Nairobi to Mombasa has already had a huge impact on both domestic and foreign tourists.
Once the SGR is extended to western towns of Kisumu and Malaba on the Kenya-Uganda border, it will further boost the tourism sector, he said.
The government is also keen to prioritize the expansion of domestic tourism because it can help to cushion the sector from volatility of international tourist arrivals, Balala said.
"We want to open up domestic tourism to the western and northern region of the country which has a rich cultural heritage that is unexploited," Balala said, noting that most of the domestic tourism is now concentrated in the coastal region.
