Strategic Factors Leading to the Growth of Tourism in Mombasa County

Tourism is an essential component to the growth and well being of the economy of Mombasa County. The main stakeholders of this industry are the hoteliers and the Mombasa County local tour operators. Mombasa is thus the bedrock of the Kenyan tourism industry with a high annual influx of domestic and foreign tourists. There is also presence of wild life activity in Mombasa County with the presence of Bamburi nature trail. Mombasa County also hosts the largest sea port in East Africa making it attractive for business visitors. In the recent years the sector has experienced a decline in growth and even shrunk due to insecurity ranging from terrorism, kidnappings, robbery with violence and cold murders. This has led to a decline in tourist numbers and thus led to the closure of majority of the hotels in the County which were a major source of employment and commerce for the locals. The presence of dilapidated infrastructure, mainly roads and water transport across the Likoni channel has made Mombasa County unattractive to tourist compounding the decline further. An example is the Likoni ferry crossing channel which has made the south coast seem inaccessible thus stifling the potential that areas like Shelly beach have. Above all those problems or inadequacies, solutions must arise to reverse this negative trend. There are strategic factors that will play a key role in ensuring the growth of the tourism sector in Mombasa County. Conference tourism, marine-based tourism, hotel investment and eco-tourism are some of the options that could be deployed. The study has an introductory part, problem statement, objectives of the research, the objectives being to evaluate the role of customer retention policies on the growth of tourism in Mombasa County, to assess the role played by stakeholder participation on the growth of tourism in Mombasa County, to establish the relationship between credit accessibility and the growth of tourism in Mombasa County and to establish the effect of training and development on the growth of the Mombasa County tourism sector, justification of the study, scope of the study and limitation of the study. The study also entailed a literature review which mainly dealt with an introductory part, theoretical literature, empirical literature, conceptual framework, summary of literature, critique of existing literature and research gaps. The study also involved a research design which used a stratified random sampling technique to select the 30 % of the target population whereby a random sample from each stratum was taken in a number proportional to the stratum`s size when compared to the population. The subset was then pooled to form a random sample. The target population of the study was therefore 112 members of staff from tour operators and 280 from tourist hotels. The sample size was thus 118 respondents. Semi-structured questionnaires were used in the study to collect primary data. Content analysis was used to analyze qualitative data and findings were presented in a prose form. Statistical package for social scientists (SPSS Version 20) was used to analyze quantitative data. Quantitative data was analyzed using inferential and descriptive statistics. Data was then presented in tables, bar-charts and pie-charts.