Last week I attended the African Hospitality Investment Forum for the first time.
It was held at the Mövenpick Windhoek and adjacent Mercure Windhoek in the Auas district of Namibia's capital city. Accor recently assumed management of those two hotels, which is owned by its robust African ownership partner Kasada Capital Management.
Namibia hosted the three-day conference for the first time, and the event went off without a hitch.
Among the panels, networking, breakouts and evening receptions, two deals were signed.
CityBlue Hotels and Dream Hotels & Resorts signed a sales, marketing and representation partnership to improve their respective growth strategies across Africa. Executives also announced a hotel signing for the TUI Blue Dabou Dyva, Côte d’Ivoire. Signings seem to never happen at European hotel-industry conferences, in my experience at least.
The conference attracted 450 attendees from more than 40 countries.
I chatted with people from or working in Uganda, Tanzania, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria and many other African countries, as well as locals from Namibia.
My first hello of the day, though, did not go to an attendee or the excellent hotel staff but to a cat, who has a cat box to sleep in and regularly filled food and water bowls. Every morning, she sat in a regal manner along one side of the Mercure watching life go by.
I asked her name, but it was agreed she did not have one. So, I will call her Ahifa, with the last “a” after the AHIF name pointing to her gender and that makes the name, perhaps wrongly, sound African. We will see if that name sticks.
The third day of the conference began with a charity run of a little more than three kilometers around the 18 holes of the Windhoek Golf Club.
It was explained that the more people who turned up to either run or walk half the distance, the more AHIF’s sponsors would donate to the Namibian Association of Community-Based Natural Resource Support Organizations, which thankfully is referred to as NACSO.
About 40 of us did, and $5,500 was raised to provide chairs and tables for 2- to 5-year-old kindergarten children.
On the two days before I went to the conference, I stayed at the almost adjacent Arebbusch Travel Lodge, which was another wonderful place to spend one's time.
It has a combination of rooms around a pool, scattered bungalows, tented rooms and even car hookups for those long-distance travelers who sleep in their own tents that fit onto the broad roofs of their large SUV and 4-wheel-drive vehicles.
The lodge had an informal restaurant and, although the Arebbusch River was dry at this time of the year, the bird life was notable. I got to know bird species I did not know before such as burnt-necked eremomela, brubru, pririt batis and blue weaver, among others.
A wonderful surprise is how excellent Namibian roads are, and not just the one from the airport that travels for 25 miles in a westerly direction to Windhoek.
I wish we had as nice a road system in the United Kingdom.
The welcome is genuine, too, and Namibians are immensely proud of their young country and the potential they see in it that has led to, among other initiatives, such events arriving as AHIF.
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