Kenya's tourism sector earned a record KSh500 billion last year and grew twice as fast as the world. An industry executive argues it did so without the digital tools the rest of the business takes for granted — and that the gap will start to cost.
Aalimi Nation · Business Desk | Nairobi
Kenya's tourism industry has just had its best year on record, and one of its own executives has used the moment to make an awkward argument: the numbers were achieved despite the sector's technology, not because of it.
Writing in Kenyan Wall Street this week, Anton Gillis, co-founder and chief executive of the hospitality technology firm HAMAC, argued that the country that taught the world to move money by phone still cannot say with confidence how well its hotels are pricing a Tuesday in April. Kenya built M-Pesa, earned the name Silicon Savannah and published a National Artificial Intelligence Strategy in March 2025 with the stated ambition of leading the continent — while its most dependable foreign exchange earner remains among the least digitally mature parts of its own economy.
Gillis has a commercial interest in that diagnosis, since his company sells software to hotels. The underlying figures, however, are the government's own.
A record year, on paper
According to the Kenya Tourism Sector Performance Report 2025, released by the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife, the country welcomed an estimated 7.9 million visitors last year — 2.7 million international arrivals and 5.2 million domestic travellers. Earnings reached approximately KSh500 billion, about $3.9 billion, up from KSh452.2 billion in 2024.
International arrivals rose from roughly 2.47 million to 2.7 million, growth of about 9 per cent. Global arrivals grew around 4 per cent over the same period, reaching an estimated 1.52 billion. Kenya grew at more than twice the world rate, in its fifth consecutive year of revenue growth.
Tourism and Wildlife Cabinet Secretary Rebecca Miano attributed the performance to destination marketing, improved air and road connectivity, diversified products, supportive policy and greater visa openness, describing it as evidence of growing international confidence in Kenya.
The composition of that growth is worth noting. Africa was the largest source region at 47 per cent of international arrivals, followed by Europe at 25 per cent and the Americas at 14 per cent. Leisure travel accounted for 46 per cent of arrivals, social visits 20 per cent and business 19 per cent. The United States remained the leading single source market, followed by Uganda, Tanzania and the United Kingdom — with India and China identified as emerging markets.
Domestic tourism, at two-thirds of total visitors, is what cushioned the sector through the Gen-Z protests and seasonal shocks.
What the argument actually is
The case Gillis makes is not that Kenyan hotels lack computers. It is that they lack the operating layer that turns occupancy data into pricing decisions.
Revenue management — adjusting room rates dynamically against demand, competitor pricing, booking pace and seasonality — is standard practice in the global hotel industry and largely automated. A property running on instinct and spreadsheets sells the same room at the same rate whether demand is soft or a conference has just filled every hotel in the district. Over a year, in a business with high fixed costs and perishable inventory, that difference is the margin.
The irony he identifies is real. Kenya solved a far harder problem in payments than hotel pricing represents, and did it fifteen years earlier.
Why this matters beyond Nairobi
Two reasons make this relevant well outside Kenya, and one of them is close to home.
India and China are the emerging markets in Kenya's own report. Indian travellers are a growth segment for East African tourism, and Indian outbound travellers book overwhelmingly through digital channels — comparison sites, aggregators, instant confirmation. A property that cannot manage dynamic inventory or connect to those distribution channels is invisible to precisely the market it says it wants.
The pattern is not unique to Kenya. Plenty of tourism economies, India's included, contain a two-speed industry: internationally branded hotels running full revenue management systems, and a much larger tail of independent properties operating on paper, WhatsApp and personal judgement. The gap tends to show up not in a bad year but in a good one, when the market rewards those who can price for demand and leaves the rest selling rooms cheap on the busiest night of the season.
There is a reasonable objection, and it deserves stating.
Kenya grew at twice the global rate without these systems. Its 47 per cent African source market books through channels where relationships, agents and repeat custom matter more than algorithmic pricing. Software licensing costs foreign currency, requires trained staff to operate and delivers returns that are real but gradual. For a modestly sized safari lodge, the case for a revenue management platform is less obvious than a technology vendor's framing suggests.
The honest version of the argument is therefore narrower than the headline. Digitisation is not what produced Kenya's record year. It is what would let the sector keep the gains when growth slows, competition sharpens and the easy post-pandemic recovery is over.
Industry stakeholders quoted in trade coverage of the same report have made a related point: structural challenges could limit future gains if left unaddressed. Record earnings are the best possible moment to fix them, and historically the least likely.
This report draws on the Kenya Tourism Sector Performance Report 2025 and on an opinion column by Anton Gillis published in Kenyan Wall Street on 27 August 2026.
