About

Summary

The tourism sector in Namibia had grown extensively since Namibia’s Independence in 1990, and by 2010 was considered one of the main contributing factors to GDP, generating employment, and having the potential to alleviate poverty with innovative tourism developments such as nature conservancies and community forests.

The Directorate of Tourism (DOT) within the Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET) recognised the importance of accurate statistical data for informed planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, and therefore identified the need to update visitor characteristics and expenditure data that was nine years old - the previous tourist exit survey was conducted in 2002.  Consequently they commissioned this tourist exit survey to be undertaken over a one-year period, thereby ensuring that seasonality patterns of inbound international tourism were taken into consideration and a significant sample allowed analysis of Namibia’s key source markets and purposes of visit.

Our Approach

The study commenced with wide-ranging consultations with key stakeholders in Namibia to understand what they expected from the survey.  This was followed up by questionnaire design and stakeholder validation, prior to a pilot survey at air and land borders.  The questionnaire was translated into five languages, and then piloted again as part of an extensive three-day training programme for the team of 30 interviewers in Windhoek.

The survey plan included sample sizes at each border post, sampling procedures, quality control, monitoring and progress reports, as well as the development of the survey database, data entry, cleaning and validation.  A plan for data weighing was also developed, taking into consideration known population sizes based on immigration data of arrivals by country of residence and purpose of visit.

Particular attention was paid to the analysis of package tours, with these requiring disaggregation into their constituent cost elements of flights, accommodation, tours, etc.  A series of consultations were undertaken with tour operators in Namibia to understand their pricing policies, as well as similar consultations with international tour operators to determine commission percentages.

Outcome

The sample size of the survey was 6,500 completed interviews over 12 month, and the weighted data was analysed to produce a comprehensive report that was divided into 11 topic areas, such as how long tourists stay, where they visit, how much they spend, etc.  Information on each of these was presented at three levels:

• Infographics: a one-page summary aimed at providing a quick snapshot of the most important information for those readers who want to very quickly get an understanding of each topic.
• Key Facts: these were slightly more detailed pieces of information, accompanied by one or two charts, to provide more insight into each topic.
• Detailed Tables: these provided detailed data relating to each category of information, showing the findings that correlated to the key markets (RSA, Angola, Botswana, Zimbabwe, UK, Germany, France, Italy, USA), the main purposes of visit (Holiday, VFR, Business, Medical, Other) and the four generating regions (Africa, Europe, Americas, Asia/Middle East).