Abstract:
Worldwide, the COVID-19 epidemic has impacted all economies. The study
examines the impact of the pandemic on the tourism and hospitality industry
in East African Community member nations. This study is a systematic review
of Covid19’s influence on the tourist and hospitality industries. The analysis
is based on 54 publications collected from the Web of Science and Scopus
databases. The current study was motivated by an extensive review of literature.
According to these studies, the spread of COVID-19 disease to workers in the
tourism industry has put the sector in jeopardy; travel restrictions and tourism
guidance have made tourism and hospitality industry suffer from severe
reduction of revenues. All these studies however do not clarify how, the
pandemic has impacted tourism and hospitality industry in terms of national
park visitors, hotel occupancy, and unemployment in particular. Therefore, the
current study assesses the impact of COVID-19’s on tourism and hospitality in
the EAC Partner States by using such indicators as the number of international
tourists, receipts and tourism jobs generated, visitors to the parks and the
rates of hotel occupancy.
The study’s fndings show that the EAC Partner States lost USD 4.8 billion in
foreign tourist earnings and two million jobs in the tourism sector due to
COVID-19. The numbers of visitors to the National parks decreased by 65 percent,
hotels in the region had an average occupancy rate of less than 30 per cent,
which had a substantial impact on their operations. The study recommends
to actors in tourism destinations, to have pandemic preparedness and risk
management plans.
