If nature allows...

I was invited by my friend who operates a travel agency here in Uganda to visit a few high-end tourist attraction areas, including some hotels that are considered five-star hotels, to assess together whether here in Uganda we are up to the same standards that are performed in Kenya and Tanzania.

I have to say the price list of such hotels is so steep that you wonder how many people are ready to pay such amounts for one or two nights of stay. It is obvious that there are reasons for high costs given that such hotels are far from Kampala or main cities hence the price of fuel to get amenities to those hotels is on the higher side. However, there is no consideration for the fact that there are mostly locals from the surrounding towns that work in such hotels, maybe managers will be coming from Kenya or another country but all the staff are locals and the prices that they are paid are does not match the amounts that the tourists pay to stay in such hotels.
 
I will be writing separate articles covering those visits and these hotels, but I have at this point to mention how amazing the service in these hotels is. This is not only because they have trained their staff but also because people in Uganda are genuinely wonderful, loving and dedicated. In the worst of situations, a smile from one of the managers and the way the problems are dealt with is simply amazing. These people are also quite knowledgeable of their product, for example when we made a cruise to the bottom of the Murchison Falls, the skipper who was quite young had so much knowledge about the flora and fauna of the surrounding areas. There was no question that was left unanswered.

The best part of it all was when he was referring to wildlife that we were going to encounter by saying: ‘we shall see such and such if nature allows’, and he kept repeating this sentence every time he was going to share with us any information about the potentiality of seeing for example an elephant or a rare bird. This sentence gave nature such a prominent position. This meant that it was for nature to decide whether we were going to see, what it will share with us or not. Of course, this also helps to lower the expectations of tourists, so that once they meet a rare phenomenon in nature, they are excited and thrilled.

At the end of the day, everybody working in such service areas is really trying their best to make the clients happy. However, sometimes their hands are tied. I have often met managers who are not capable of going out of their way to please the client simply because they have very limited powers. Unfortunately, this means that some clients will not return.