Tourists to pay Mara fees through cheque

Tourists at the Maasai Mara National Reserve. (Photo:File/Standard)

By Macharia Kamau

Kenya: Tourists to the Maasai Mara National Reserve will now be required to pay their park entry fees using a banker’s cheque.

The Narok County government will also require visitors to pay entry charges in advance as it will not accept payments at the gates.

The county said it would distribute tickets to the reserve through Kenya Association of Tour Operators (Kato) in a bid to improve efficiency in its ticketing system after termination of an e-ticketing deal with Equity Bank and to seal revenue losses that come with handling cash at points of entry.

The park experiences a surge in the number of tourists to the Mara during this time of the year, and after the county’s deal with Equity Bank fell through, it resorted to distributing manual tickets through Kato to prevent disruption.

Fred Kaigua, the Kato chief executive, said the county government had stationed officers in Nairobi.

Key revenue source

“What we have done is given them space, and hence it is Narok County employees that are stationed at our offices,” he said. “Tour operators bring in 80 per cent of the visitors to the Mara, and hence are a key revenue source. Being based at our offices is one way for the county to ensure its key income source is served.”

Tour companies and other visitors based away from Nairobi will be forced to use courier services to purchase tickets, or buy them at the county government’s offices in Narok town.

The county said the manual ticket-based system it has in place at the moment has features that would guard against revenue leaks.

A substantial fraction of tourism industry earnings come in during the high season that runs between July and October, which usually coincides with the wildebeest migration that peaks around October.