Lagos: Kweku Tandoh, Chief Operating Officer of the African Table Tennis Federation, has urged Nigeria to leverage sporting events to drive tourism and economic development. Tandoh made the call while speaking on ‘Hosting Sporting Events and Their Impact on Tourism’ at the ongoing 22nd Akwaaba African Travel Market in Lagos.
According to News Agency of Nigeria, the three-day expo, organised by Akwaaba Travel Market Ltd., is being held from September 13 to September 15. The event brings together tourism stakeholders, including travel agents, tour operators, hospitality brands, exhibitors, and tourism boards from across Africa. Exhibitors include The Gambia, Carnival Calabar, Eko Hotel and Suites, Air Peace, Cinderella Travel and Tours, Ghana Tourism Authority, Accra City Hotel, and The Peninsula Resort and Golf Club, among others.
Tandoh highlighted that sporting events attract athletes, coaches, and officials from various destinations, creating opportunities for tourism-related businesses. ‘Those people will require accommodation, they will require food, they will require entertainment, and so on and so forth,’ he said.
He emphasized that countries are increasingly using sporting events as platforms for tourism, economic development, and infrastructure improvement, rather than merely as competitions. ‘But now, we’re finding out that it’s more like, how do we turn this sporting event into a tourism and economic development platform?’ he stated.
The benefits of sporting events, according to Tandoh, extend beyond stadiums to hotels, airlines, restaurants, retailers, artisans, tour operators, and the media. He cited the 2012 National Sports Festival in Lagos, where boat rides and tours organized for athletes exposed them to tourism attractions, encouraging some participants to consider returning to Lagos after the event.
Tandoh also mentioned the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa as an example of how sporting events can provide opportunities for destination marketing due to competitions being broadcast locally, nationally, and internationally.
He urged countries hosting sporting events to ensure that infrastructure developed for such events remains useful to communities after the competitions. ‘Then after that event, you find that there’s nobody else using that infrastructure,’ he noted. Organizers should prioritize facilities that could serve communities beyond the duration of the events.
According to Tandoh, the success of sporting events should not be solely measured by attendance but also by their tourism, economic, destination-development, and sporting outcomes. ‘Hosting an event is not automatically profitable,’ he said.
He proposed a five-point framework including bid, build, package, market, and legacy, for linking sports with tourism. Citing C´te d’Ivoire and Cape Town as examples, he noted that C´te d’Ivoire recorded significant tourism and economic benefits from hosting the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations, while Cape Town successfully packaged sporting events throughout the year.
Tandoh urged Nigeria to deliberately convert sports spectators into tourists who would return to destinations, thereby creating lasting tourism and economic value from sporting events. NAN reports that the Akwaaba African Travel Market is leveraging the 2027 AFCON to deepen collaboration between African sports and tourism through the African Tour Operators Summit, which aims to promote sports tourism, trade, and intra-African travel.