LONDON: West African tourist chiefs urged travellers yesterday not to boycott their region because of the Ebola crisis, insisting that the epidemic was only affecting three countries in a vast continent.
“Africa is not a country, Africa is a continent,” said Ola Wright, the chief executive of West Africa Tourism, warning that fear over Ebola in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone was having a damaging impact on neighbouring countries.
The deadly virus has brought an abrupt and indefinite halt to international tourism in those three affected countries, where almost 5,000 people have died in the outbreak.
But tourism has been affected across the region and even in east and southern Africa, which are thousands of miles (kilometres) away and have not reported Ebola cases. “We’ve had a lot of complaints from different people, from hoteliers, tour operators, complaining that sales have really gone down and of loads of different cancellations,” Wright told AFP at the World Travel Market fair in London.
“The fear is more damaging than the actual problem,” she said, adding: “It’s just ignorance.”
Sierra Leone pulled out of the international travel show exhibition last week, while Guinea and Liberia do not normally attend, but Senegal and Nigeria both
had stands. AFP
