On 1 April 2026, Kenya's Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife published its 2025 tourism performance report. The headline numbers were good. International arrivals rose by about 9 percent to 2.7 million, up from 2.47 million in 2024, compared with global growth of roughly 4 percent. Add 5.2 million domestic travellers and Kenya recorded about 7.9 million visitors altogether. The sector also generated around KSh 500 billion, or about $3.8 billion.
Africa accounted for 47 percent of international arrivals, followed by Europe at 25 percent and the Americas at 14 percent. The United States was the largest individual source market, followed by Uganda, Tanzania and the United Kingdom.
For Kenya, it was not just about selling Kenya as a destination. Kenya also worked on the things that can stop a person from booking in the first place: visas, flights, fares and the ease of making the trip, because if the process is too difficult or expensive, the trip never gets booked.
Kenya took the visa out of the conversation
In January 2025, Kenya's Cabinet approved plans to remove the Electronic Travel Authorization, or eTA, requirement for citizens of almost every African country, initially excluding Somalia and Libya on security grounds. The change was gazetted on 30 May 2025 and took effect in July.
An eTA is a pre-travel clearance, not a visa. Travelers apply online before departure, pay a fee and wait for approval before they can board. It is generally presented as a simpler alternative to a visa.
Under Kenya's revised rules, the exemption is not the same for everyone. Citizens of East African Community countries can stay for up to 180 days, while other African nationals can stay for 90 or 60 days, depending on their country. The important part is that they no longer have to get pre-approval before travelling to Kenya.
Kenya introduced the eTA in January 2024, replacing its previous visa system and presenting the change as a move towards visa-free travel. But travelers still had to apply online, pay $30 and wait for approval. Before long, some travelers, tourism operators and commentators were calling it a visa by another name.
That somehow became a problem; Kenya had removed the visa, but added another step before travel, changing how the system worked for people trying to travel. Tourism and Wildlife Cabinet Secretary Rebecca Miano later said feedback collected from travelers as they left the country, along with complaints shared on social media, showed that people were frustrated with the eTA process. Kenya's position in the 2024 Africa Visa Openness Index also fell 17 places to 46th after the eTA was introduced. Tourism and Wildlife Cabinet Secretary Rebecca Miano later said feedback collected from travelers as they left the country, along with complaints shared on social media, showed that people were frustrated with the eTA process. Kenya's position in the 2024 Africa Visa Openness Index also fell 17 places to 46th after the eTA was introduced.
The reversal is also interesting when viewed against how Kenya described tourism growth in 2025. The Ministry's 2025 tourism report describes streamlined entry processes as one of the factors supporting tourism growth. The eTA was part of that streamlined system because it replaced the previous visa process with an online travel authorization.
But Kenya later went further for most African travelers. Instead of asking them to apply for an eTA before travelling, it removed the requirement altogether.
The eTA was simpler than the visa process it replaced, but it still required an online application, a fee and a wait for approval. Removing the eTA took those steps away entirely. For a traveler, especially one who previously needed only to arrive with the required documents, what matters is not what the policy is called. It is how many steps, fees and delays stand between deciding to go and actually getting on the plane.
Then it went after the fare and the flight
The Kenya Tourism Board, Visa and Kenya Airways launched a six-month campaign running from April to September 2026, offering discounts to travelers who pay with a Visa card. Kenya Airways says the offer gives travelers 8 percent off international flights and 5 percent off domestic flights. KTB CEO June Chepkemei said the partnership is part of Kenya's effort to strengthen its position as a global destination through data-driven marketing.
The partnership also gives KTB access to Visa's Government Insights Hub, which uses payment data to show travel patterns, peak seasons, regional preferences and spending behavior. That gives the tourism board a better idea of where visitors are coming from, when they travel and where they spend their money. It might not give a complete picture of tourism spending, but it is still more useful than making decisions based on assumptions.
Kenya is also working on the other part of the journey: getting people there.
At the Pearl of Africa Tourism Expo in Kampala in May 2026, Kenyan officials said they were targeting 300,000 Ugandan visitors for the year. Kenya Airways' country manager for Uganda pointed to daily Entebbe-Nairobi-Mombasa flights as one of the things that could help make that possible, alongside easier entry and joint marketing under the East African Community's "Visit East Africa: Feel the Vibe" campaign.
The demand is not only for safaris. Kenyan hospitality operators at the expo said Ugandan visitors were showing particular interest in destination weddings, conferences in Kilifi and Kwale, and large events. That is really good because these are different kinds of travelers, with different reasons for going and different things they need from a destination.
Put all of that together and the strategy starts to look less like traditional tourism marketing and more like fixing the journey itself. If someone already wants to visit Kenya, removing the visa requirement, making the flight easier to book, lowering the fare and using better data to understand the market can make it easier for that interest to turn into an actual trip.
But the friction fix has not yet produced the number
Here is where the story gets a little more complicated.
Kenya had already set a target of 300,000 visitors from Uganda at the 2025 Pearl of Africa Tourism Expo, describing it as a 27 percent increase. Tourism and Wildlife Cabinet Secretary Rebecca Miano also said at the time that the visa-free policy for African countries was helping to drive growth in regional arrivals.
Kenya ended 2025 with 234,556 arrivals from Uganda.
Then, at POATE 2026, Kenya announced the 300,000 target again, still describing it as a 27 percent increase. In reporting on that announcement, the Kenya Tourism Board said Uganda recorded 234,556 arrivals in 2025, representing 31 percent of African arrivals and an 8.7 percent increase from the previous year.
But those figures do not quite match Kenya's other published numbers.
Kenya's 2024 reporting put Uganda at 225,559 arrivals. Compared with 234,556 in 2025, that is an increase of about 4 percent, not 8.7 percent.
There is another problem with the 8.7 percent figure. Uganda's 234,556 arrivals amount to roughly 8.7 percent of Kenya's total 2025 international arrivals of about 2.7 million. Maybe the 8.7 percent figure is Uganda's share of Kenya's total arrivals, as against its growth from the previous year.
The 31 percent figure raises a similar question. Kenya's 2025 tourism report puts African arrivals at 47 percent of roughly 2.7 million international arrivals, or about 1.27 million people. Uganda's 234,556 arrivals would be around 18 percent of that, not 31 percent.
There may be a straightforward explanation. The figures could be based on different datasets or definitions. But without that explanation, they do not line up.
And that matters because Kenya is using these numbers to talk about growth in the Ugandan market while carrying the same 300,000 target into another year. It is reasonable to ask exactly what the percentages are measuring.
The Magical Kenya Travel Expo does the credibility work
There’s also the Magical Kenya Travel Expo, the platform Kenya uses to bring international buyers, tour operators and media directly into the destination.
The 16th edition runs from 6 to 8 October 2026 at Uhuru Gardens in Nairobi. KTB expects more than 10,000 delegates from 40 countries, more than 400 exhibitors and over 250 international buyers. If that happens, it would be the largest edition since the expo began.
The expo itself has been growing. It recorded around 4,000 delegates in 2024 and 7,691 in 2025. KTB is now expecting more than 10,000 in 2026.
That matters because the expo is not simply an advertising exercise. It puts Kenyan tourism businesses in the same room as the people who can actually sell Kenya: tour operators, travel buyers and other industry partners. More participation means more opportunities to build those relationships, although it does not automatically translate into more visitors.
This year's theme is "Digital Transformation and Artificial Intelligence: Shaping the Future of Tourism," with dedicated programming for Kenya's Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions sector.
The MICE (Meetings, Incentive Travels, Conferences and Events) tourism focus brings the question of travel access back into the picture. Business and event travel depends heavily on practical things such as visa processing, flight schedules, airport transfers and the ability to move large groups efficiently. For a company sending 200 people to a conference, streamlining the ETAs process and taking it off completely for African countries would encourage them to come.
That is also why the Ugandan market is worth watching. Kenyan tourism officials have identified demand from Ugandan buyers for the Kenyan coastal destinations. If Kenya wants to turn that interest into actual bookings and arrivals, connectivity and ease of entry become part of the product they are selling.
And Kenya is aiming for much more than growth from Uganda. At the expo launch, the country also set a target of five million international arrivals by the end of 2027.
Kenya recorded about 2.7 million international arrivals in 2025. Getting to five million would mean adding roughly 2.3 million visitors in less than two years, an increase of about 85 percent.
The goal seems achievable and is clear. The question is whether the policies, air connectivity, trade relationships and destination marketing now being put in place can produce arrivals at that scale.
The numbers behind the strategy
The World Travel & Tourism Council's 2026 Economic Impact Research, released in July 2026, shows how much tourism now contributes to Kenya's economy. Travel and tourism contributed $12.7 billion to Kenya's economy in 2025, representing 9.3 percent of GDP, and supported 1.8 million jobs, or 8.3 percent of total employment. Kenya recorded a $3.96 billion travel and tourism trade surplus, meaning it earned more from international visitors than Kenyans spent on travel abroad.
There is a sustainability angle here too. WTTC found that 19.9 percent of the energy used by Kenya's tourism sector comes from low-carbon sources, such as solar. That is more than three times the global average of 5.9 percent and well above the African average of 2.9 percent.
That matters because tourism uses a lot of energy. Hotels need power, airports need power, restaurants need power, and the wider tourism supply chain does too. Using more low-carbon energy means a greater share of that activity is being powered by sources that produce fewer carbon emissions than fossil fuels. So the 19.9 percent figure does not describe all the energy used by tourism in Kenya. It tells us how much of that energy is coming from lower-carbon sources, and Kenya's share is considerably higher than the global and African averages.
WTTC President and CEO Gloria Guevara has pointed to Kenya as an example of how tourism growth and sustainability can develop alongside each other.
One caveat travels with all of it. WTTC puts Kenya's international visitor arrivals in 2025 at 2.5 million, with 5.6 percent growth. Kenya's own Ministry puts the figure at 2.7 million, with 9 percent growth. The Ministry also revised its 2024 figure from 2.4 million to 2.47 million.
The gap between the two 2025 figures is not huge, but the numbers are clearly different. The same is true of the reported growth rates. That does not necessarily mean one organization has got it wrong. The two may be using different definitions or methods for counting international visitors. But it does mean we should be careful about comparing the figures directly, especially when they are being used to show that a particular tourism strategy is working.
What this reveals about how destinations actually get built
Almost everything Kenya did in 2026 was about making it easier to turn an existing desire to travel to Kenya into an actual trip. The visa, the fare, the route and the booking process all affect what happens once someone has decided they want to go. Alongside that, Kenya was using trade platforms to connect its tourism businesses with buyers who can help turn interest in the destination into actual bookings.
Kenya’s strategy is impressive because tourism is often talked about as a question of how to persuade people to visit. But beyond the persuasion, countries need to ensure that the process of interest to actualization (booking a trip) is simple, clear and fast. Because you can lose some leads during application. A traveler who encounters an application form, another fee, a difficult connection or a fare that is higher than expected would not travel. Kenya appears to have recognized some of those problems and started removing them.
None of these things guarantees a particular number of visitors. But together, they make it easier for demand to become an actual trip.
That may be the more useful lesson for other destinations. Tourism growth is rarely the result of one campaign or one big idea only. It is built through a series of decisions that make a destination easier to discover, easier to sell and easier to reach.
The decisions that shape tourism decisions for a traveler might not always be the ones visitors see in a campaign. Sometimes it could be; a change to an entry rule, a new flight route, a better payment system or a conversation between tourism officials and travel buyers. These things could make the difference between someone being interested in a destination and actually getting there.
Sources
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Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife, Kenya Tourism Sector Performance Report 2025, released 1 April 2026, as reported by Xinhua, "Kenya's foreign tourist arrivals up 9 pct in 2025", 2 April 2026
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Citizen Digital, "Kenya records 7.9 million tourists in 2025 as sector earns Ksh.500 billion"
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People Daily, "Kenya's 2025 tourism season smashes records with Ksh500B revenue", 2 April 2026
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Kenya News Agency, "Kenya hits record of 2.4 million international tourists"
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Kenya Law, The Kenya Citizenship and Immigration Regulations, as amended 30 May 2025
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Fragomen, "Kenya: Relaxed Entry Requirements for Some Nationals and Forthcoming Pre-Screening System"
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Reuters, "Kenya tourism board partners with Visa to boost travel spending"
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Kenya Airways, "KQ and Visa Offer 2026"
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Monitor, "Kenya eyes 300,000 Ugandan tourists by end of 2025"
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The Star, "Kenya eying 300,000 Ugandan visitors", 24 May 2026
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Capital Business, "Kenya eyes 300,000 Ugandan tourists in 2026 on improved air links", 25 May 2026
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The Standard, "Magical Kenya Travel Expo attracts 10,000 delegates"
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The Standard, "Kenya eyes 5m visitors as Magical Kenya travel expo targets record attendance"
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Kenya News Agency, "Government Kicks Off the 2024 Magical Kenya Travel Expo"
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World Travel & Tourism Council, "Kenya Boosts Africa's Tourism Growth, Emerging as a Leading Sustainable Tourism Powerhouse", 28 July 2026