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NAIROBI. — Travel agency manager Tomas Garcia has had a disastrous week, with one of his flagship branches, located in Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall, destroyed in the siege that followed an attack by Islamist gunmen.
Since the attack his company, Vintage Africa, has been hit by a further wave of bad news, suffering US$189 000 of cancellations from nervous tourists.

“I’d feared worse,” he said, trying to put a brave face on the losses. “I’d thought we might have had as much as US$1 million in cancellations.”

Still, there is sense in Kenya’s tourism business that bad days could be ahead, and that this could be catastrophic for the country. The sector, built up around luxury safari tours and white sand beach resorts, accounts for 12,5 percent of economic output, 7,4 percent of investment and 11 percent of jobs.

The concerns have been underscored by the angry reaction to travel warnings by foreign embassies, with Kenya’s Interior Minister Joseph Ole Lenku asking the United States to lift what he said was “unnecessary” and “unfriendly” travel advice.

“We believe issuing the travel advisory is counter-productive in the fight against global terrorism,” Ole Lenku said of the warning, which urged US citizens to “evaluate their personal security situation in light of continuing and recently heightened threats from terrorism”.
Tourists already in Kenya, US citizens included, seemed for the most part relaxed.

“It hasn’t deterred us. I was concerned about it, but thought this is the right thing to do for the country, to not hide,” said Dan Woods, a Californian who was out for a stroll in the gardens of the Karen Blixen Museum — the old colonial-era bungalow of “Out of Africa” fame. — AFP.