My friend just wound up his car rental in Mombasa. He specialized in providing rental cars for tourists visiting the coast. That was his main business. He also earned a little from GoK and domestic tourists who rented from time to time. After the Somalia thing he recons it was just descent to bankruptcy.
He sold many of his cars at a loss to pay off the car loans and cancelled any new orders. He says by the time he paid the last owed coin, he was technically bankrupt. He was lucky to hand over his staff to another company that was starting in TZ to transport tourists from the border to spots in TZ. So he escaped being blackmailed by trade union leaders who were already paying him visits. He settled with casual workers and terminated contracts with tyre suppliers, repair workshops and insurance companies.
I had one car in his fleet, he parked it wrote the mileage and directed the parking and service bill to me. I asked him to sell it if he gets a good offer.
He says he escaped lightly compared to hoteliers and apartment owners who had taken huge loans to invest in tourism. He says what is now being lost is the capacity. It is shrinking to the extent that if it goes on for another 2 years, it would need a decade to restore it. If some of those hotels change hands and get altered to factories or other things, the chances of re-conversion will decrease.
Most damaging is the loss of qualified staff. Most have joined colleges and retrained for other jobs and will not return to the uncertainty of the hotel industry
Topic: Tourism is Dead. My Friend Wound Up Car Rental (Read 3769 times)