The Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Tourism Authority, Mr Akwasi Agyeman, has disclosed that about 80 per cent of hotels in Ghana don’t have websites.

According to him, the unfortunate situation came to light following a feasibility study of hotels in the country, pushing the authority to set up an application called Ghana App to aid tourists, especially those abroad, book hotels.

Making a contribution at the Graphic Showbiz forum on the theme: “Maximising the benefits of digitisation in COVID-19 era” on Tuesday, June 22, Mr Agyeman expressed his disappointment about how some hotels didn’t even have computers to take records of and trace those who patronised their facilities.

“The little that I know from the feasibility studies we did in the country is that about 80 per cent of hotels don’t even have a website. If you go to the hotel, they don’t even have a computer that will enable you to log in, so the receptionist will hand you a key and then you enter the room and the following day, you give the key out and then you are gone.

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“So there’s no data, no way that even the owners can trace who has come to the hotel and all that and certainly, it is not the best,” he said.

Relevance of digitisation
The inability of hotels in Ghana to adapt to new technology continues to impact negatively on them, and according to Mr Agyeman, many hotels lost out on a good opportunity to make money during the Year of Return in 2019.

“When we had the Year of Return in 2019 for example, many hotels complained that they saw people come in but they didn’t book their hotels.

“But the question is, where were they expecting them to book? Did they expect them to walk to for instance, Kokomlemle, and ask of the nearest hotel? It doesn’t work like that anymore.

“So Air BnB, an online marketplace that connects people who want to rent out their homes with people who are looking for accommodation in that locality, took advantage and the revenue in that space grew by about 126 per cent,” he stated.

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The panellists on the forum, drawn from various sectors of the creative industry, were rapper Okyeame Kwame; events organiser and CEO of the 3Music Awards, Sadiq Abdulai Abu; filmmaker Ivan Quashigah; creative entrepreneur Mabel Simpson of Msimps; artiste manager George Britton and blogger Ameyaw Debrah.

Moderated by the General Manager of Media General Television, Francis Doku, the forum focused on options available digitally for creatives to exploit and how beneficial, especially from a financial perspective, digitisation could be.