I AM spending the whole of this week in Cape Town and when I look around, I sense that the tourism product is generally subdued. It is not the excessive hype we were sold pre-World Cup 2010 of exponential growth in arrivals.

I have read through the annual report of one of the JSE listed South African tourism-focused companies and they are also stuck in the doldrums. They over expanded their capacity, anticipating post-World Cup boom and now they are biting their fingers.

Just to put my own cards on the table, we also bought into the growth of the Zimbabwe tourism product and tried to put together a family guest lodge in Harare way before the World Cup 2010. I also believe in the potential of the Zimbabwe tourism product. After paying all those municipal permit fees, and ZTA registration requirements, the money did not roll in as expected. We have been forced by circumstances to change the strategy, but I digress.

The purpose of this article is to look at the Zimbabwean tourism product and try and pose fundamental questions around it. A tourist-driven city like Cape Town provides adequate ambiance to ponder this issue. The first thing I tend to notice is that the African tourism product is generically Eurocentric, whether in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Zambia, Kenya or Botswana. It is designed for the European traveller and for many of us with an Afro-centric perspective, it just gets rammed down our throats.

The perception is that we should be glad to partake in a euro-focused product. The marketers of the product want you to be quite grateful to buy it and generally get upset when you begin to question what you are buying.

Zimbabweans traditionally like to spend the Easter holidays at home, not necessarily to commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ but for many it is just a time to be with the extended family. Of course, what some Zimbabweans call being on holiday is just visiting families back home without really spending money on a real tourism product.

Conservatively, I think there are 2,5 million Zimbabweans really living in the diaspora. If we estimate that 10% of this group can genuinely afford to go on holiday, then 25,0000 is a significant market size to work with. If just 100,000 of this group actually decide to go on holiday in Zimbabwe during these coming holidays, then it is a significant number with sufficient spending power.

The questions I then ask is where are they spending their money and why? One of the key reasons of this column is to encourage us to stop being just consumers of other people’s products wherever we are, to being producers and traders of our own products. It ought to be a daily relevant question for any of us to question on a daily basis who is taking our money and whether it is circulating at all in our own community. If it is not, then we must seek to increase this velocity of circulation and the tourism product represents one of the low hanging fruits.

If we review this value chain, we notice there are opportunities for travel agents, transport operators, tour operators, producers and vendors of memorabilia. There are gaps in restaurants which provide a genuinely African cuisine. There is still a general oversupply of accommodation although there are some shortages in some niche markets.

Many of us have produced and brought up children who are growing up and know only the diaspora as their home. It is important to educate them on where they come from so that they have sufficient grounding. We were looking at our own family tree and we were only able to go back six generations. My Jewish friends can go back more than 10 generations because their family genealogies are properly documented. For us, beyond a certain point it just becomes conflicting oral history. Tracing our history can also add value to our economic cake back home as our tourism spend helps Zimbabwe’s domestic economy.

Whenever I travel to any place I am genuinely interested to see how people around the places I visit really live. For a European traveler visiting Matopos, seeing the burial place of Cecil John Rhodes and taking pictures is enough. Visiting Victoria Falls and taking group photos with the statue of David Livingstone is a highlight in itself. We would then ask how these people around these areas live. What do they eat and how do they survive? What really is their story?

Surely we should be able to have our own travel and tour operators wherever we have critical masses of Zimbabweans like the UK and Ireland, South Africa and Botswana, Australia and New Zealand, United States and Canada. A cursory survey would probably show that much of this spend is going towards other people not in our own communities.

If of the 100,000 who may visit our nation during the Easter and Independence holiday period spend on average $400 per person, then it’s a staggering $40 million spend during this period. It should be a genuine question to ask in whose pocket most of this money ends up?