Ethiopia has a wealth of natural and cultural resources, with some unique cultural and natural features that

set it apart from other African destinations. In the last decade, international arrivals to Ethiopia have
shown a positive trend, reaching nearly one million in 2017. However, growth has been fueled mainly by
the increase of international tourism worldwide, improved air connectivity and a dynamic economy that
generates many business trips. Tourism data are skewed by weaknesses in the visa system, a large
diaspora travelling on foreign passports, and an increasing number of transit passengers from Ethiopian
Airlines flights (that cross the border to spend a night or a few hours in Addis). These have to be
considered to draw meaningful conclusions.
Holiday trips represented 37.4% of total arrivals in 2016 while Europe generated over a third of those
trips (34.4%). The UK, Germany, Italy and France consistently appear in the ranking of the top-10
tourism generating markets for leisure tourism. Sweden and the Netherlands also appear high in the
ranking.
However, it seems that Ethiopia receives fewer holiday tourists than the number that can be concluded
from official data. The sentiment of many incoming operators, and the low number of foreign visitors in
key tourism attractions such as the National Museum in Addis Ababa (47,208 in 2016), the Simien
Mountains National Park (10,685 visitors in 2016) and Lalibela (25,069 visitors in 2016), confirm this
point. Both the Simien and Lalibela are UNESCO sites. Thus, the number of true holiday trips from
Europe to Ethiopia is well below the official 112,000 annual visitors (2016) (which includes a difficult to
explain 25% growth over 2015).
Moreover, most tourists follow the same two routes (North and South) and the leisure demand is quite
seasonal due to the prevalent image among European outbound operators that the rainy season (European
summer) is not a good moment to visit Ethiopia. However, Italy and Spain do generate visits at that time,
when the number of holiday trips tends to go down.
There are opportunities for growth, but more proactive commercialization is needed. Current international
trends in European markets present opportunities to diversify the product portfolio and attract more
visitors, and European markets were prioritized by the Marketing and Branding Strategy as being among
the ‘core’ markets with high revenue potential and high affinity for leisure travel to Ethiopia, as well as
among the ‘steady markets’ that are easier to penetrate.
In spite of all the opportunities, important obstacles and challenges hinder competitive and sustainable
tourism development in Ethiopia, the most important being:
Trends in international visitor arrivals
Upward curve of international tourist arrivals to Ethiopia. International arrivals to Ethiopia reached
596,341 in 2012, a 39.6% growth since 2009. This upward trend continued in 2013–2017, with a record
933,344 figure in 2017.
 International tourist arrivals in Ethiopia : all trips

Source: World Bank, accessed via Tradingeconomics.com
https://tradingeconomics.com/ethiopia/internationaltourism-number-of-arrivals-wb-data.html