‎ Report Analysis of International air travel to East Africa in 2016 (January to August) by ForwardKeys, a company that predicts future travel patterns by crunching and analysing 14 million booking transactions a day has revealed strong growth of 11.2 per cent compared with the same period last year.

This is an exceptional performance as growth for Africa as whole has been 5.6 per cent, with countries like Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia seeing little growth or even a decline. CEO, ForwardKeys, Olivier Jager revealed that “We are seeing a tale of two Africans, with North African countries suffering from political instability and terror activities and Sub Saharan African countries powering ahead, with Ethiopia up 9.6 per cent, Tanzania up 10.6 per cent, Mauritius up 11.6 per cent and Kenya up 14.9 per cent. South Africa is up 11.4 per cent."Looking ahead to the remainder of the year, the picture is highly encouraging for East Africa," he said.

An analysis of airport capacity, defined by the total number of seats, revealed that the 'stars' in terms of growth are Nairobi, Kigali and Kilimanjaro. Jager also explained that in the periods Q3 2015 - Q2 2016 and Q3 2016 - Q2 2017, Nairobi grew zero per cent and two per cent respectively, Kigali five per cent and four per cent respectively and Kilimanjaro 11 per cent and 20 per cent respectively.

  Whilst a two per cent growth for Nairobi may not sound so impressive, its capacity is around four times that of Kigali."The data has been released ahead of AviaDev, a new airline route development conference and AHIF, Africa’s highest profile hotel investment conference, which run concurrently at the Radisson Blu Hotel and Convention Centre in Kigali between October 4 and 6 2016," he said.Furthermore, Jonathan Worsley, Chairman of Bench Events, which is organising AHIF and AviaDev, said:

 “We are seeing unprecedented interest in the AHIF AviaDev combination, with over 20 airlines signing up to talk about new air routes, with global CEOs of the world’s biggest hotel companies present to discuss their plans for Africa and with government ministers keen to attract inward investment; one has to ask: “Why is there such serious interest?” These highly encouraging booking figures explain it.

”Jonathan added that “If what is happening in Rwanda becomes a yardstick against which other East African countries measure themselves, I would expect this strong growth to continue.