Tanzania will this January bring to force its restructured tourism business license fees, a move that will to great extent, even out the playing field for foreign and local players.
Imagine you are tasked with racing the fastest animal on land, the cheetah, would you beat it? Not on foot, you won’t!
That is the daunting, impossible task that local tour operators have had to face year after year competing with their foreign counterparts for market share. Actually, the plight also weights heavy on foreign actors with limited capital.
With larger financial muscles to flex and comparatively lower fees to pay, big capital foreign competitors maintained and extended the lead above smaller capital foreign players and flew well above low capital local operators.
Before the proposed restructuring, foreign tour operators paid a flat rate fee of 5,000 USD. That is, an operator with 50+ vehicles spread across say 10 national parks paid the same fee as one with just 10 vehicles operating in one or two national parks.
Local operators had it worse, they were forced to pay a flat rate fee of 2000 USD even if they had a single vehicle! With the new fees coming into play, all that is now about to change, now you race the cheetah, but with a 4 wheel drive vehicle.
Announcing the new fee structure late last year, Tanzanian Minister of Natural Resources and Tourism of Tanzania, Dr Hamis Kigwangalla said “the new Tanzania Tourism Business License (TTBL) fee structure is intended to make it affordable for smaller local companies to operate.”
Here are the new fees effective January 2018:
|
Type of operator
|
Vehicle Count |
Count Annual Fee (USD) |
||
| Foreign | 10 – 30 | 5 000 | ||
| 31 – 50 | 7 500 | |||
| 51+ | 10 000 | |||
| Local | 1 – 3 | 500 | ||
| 4 – 10 | 2 000 | |||
| 51+ | 5 000 |
