Bolaji Mustapha: Tour Operators Must Collaborate for Tourism to Thrive

President of Nigeria Association of Tour Operators, Mrs. Bolaji Mustapha, advocates synergy among stakeholders in the industry to make tourism thrive within West Africa and beyond. Charles Ajunwa brings excerpts:

What is your take on need for seamless movement within West Africa?

 For a successful seamless movement in West Africa, the tour operators should work on what I call PPP (Public Private Partnership) model. As tour operators we need to go ahead to see how we can collaborate with each other and advocate way forward for tourism within West Africa and Africa at large. Of course, where we have problems about infrastructure, so that we can have good road networks. In the past, we’ve had South African tourism and others coming to Nigeria to do road shows with us. But that kind of synergy has not happened within us, except at this Accra Weizo exhibition where you have all the key tour operators coming together to advocate way forward for tourism with West Africa and Africa at large.

As tour operators we should see how we can do joint marketing and road shows together, create contents together, use the AI tools to create contents together in marketing tourism in West Africa. We also create itinerary to say, you bring tourists to Nigeria, and we in same manner reciprocate the gesture. It’s possible and it’s doable. They can receive my own tourists and we can receive theirs in a very seamless manner, and also create some kind of lingual franca to break the barrier of language problem. This will help the English speaking countries and French speaking countries to understand themselves. If we have a connection in terms of language it will help people travelling without going through a lot of hassles at the borders. Honestly, we need to collaborate to market West Africa.

The same problems we encountered last year repeated again this year. Is there anything we can do to make movement seamless for tourists coming from Ghana to Nigeria and verse versa?

Look, once we come together we can advocate about the infrastructure especially the good road networks. If you have good road network from Nigeria all the way to Ghana, the cost of flight will reduce. This is one of the things making air tickets to be high because a lot of people can’t travel by road. They depend on flights to get to their destinations. That’s why travelling within West Africa is even more expensive than travelling to other parts of the world. Some flight tickets are sold above N1 million just coming to Accra.  If we don’t agree, there’s no way we can find solutions to these problems inhibiting seamless movement within West Africa. You know, when we come together and resolve that we need to solve this as a family, we will be able to remove these man-made barriers negatively impacting on our tourism. We also need government participation in order to make this happen as seamless movement of people encourages businesses to flourish. A lot of hotels and apartments springing up in Lagos, and other parts of Nigeria which inbound tourists will love to stay.

As NATOP president this is your first Accra Weizo. What is your take about the tourism conference?

It’s a way of bringing us Africans together, which is the way to go. We need to start from ourselves before going out to market other destinations in Africa. It’s a good experience for me, at least, witnessing the crowd here. Everybody has the opportunity to make contributions on how to expand tourism in West Africa, in particular, and Africa at large. I thank the organisers for doing a good job by bringing all tour operators in West Africa under one roof to brain storm on ways of achieving seamless movement across our borders, which I believe at the end of the day will help tourism to thrive. West Africa is blessed with natural tourism sites, and we need to explore all these for sociocultural, economic and political benefits.

What are you doing in terms of partnerships?

We have started talks with airlines and embassies to ensure they partner with the tour operators to encourage inbound tourism. We have a stringent registration process which ensures only qualified tour operators become our members. We also have collaborations with state governments to expand tourism nationwide. This is one of the things that has given NATOP visibility.

 Tell us about your achievements since coming on board as NATOP president?

We just attained one year recently. We’ve been able to put a solid structure in place. We’ve been able to put data in place and able to form different kinds of partnerships. We can boldly say that we have visibility now. We have been able to identify some tourism sites within Nigeria, which we’re promoting. We’re going around telling people about the tourism potential in Nigeria. And by so doing, we’ve been able to put Nigeria at the world map. We now tell our story ourselves because before we allow other people to help us tell our story. Now, NATOP has been able to bring Nigeria to the world, especially, at the WTM (World Travel Market) we tell an authentic Nigeria story. And a lot of people are willing to visit these beautiful places in our country.  Since I came on board, I have insisted that as Nigerians we need to travel within Nigeria. Many Nigerians pay money to visit tourism destinations in other countries. Why not here. Afterall, Charity they say, begins from home. We must patronise what we have. That is patriotism, and by so doing others will love to visit Nigeria. A lot of resources are wasting and they needed to be improved upon. 

There’s a resort that is seating on a 500 hectares in Ondo State overlooking a lake, a gulf course on a farmland. That is ecotourism, and it is one of the things we are promoting in Nigeria.

At the just-concluded NATOP AGM, we had speakers who spoke about ecotourism. It’s just about identifying some hidden gems that we have. The theme for the AGM is: ‘Unveiling The Beauty Of Ecotourism’. The governor of Ondo supported us. In fact, the state government has a plan to promote destination Ondo. The governor is from Araromi in Ondo, where you have one of the cleanest beaches, and longest coastline in the whole of West Africa. The hills there, they are trying to improve on them and other places. We brought everybody to Ondo to experience ecotourism.