We had every hope of seeing X on the day we were to visit Molepolole, but because Air Botswana had messed up our flight arrangements we had to return early to Gaborone. (An email note from a friend in Canada, which I received earlier this year.) To suggest that transport, telecommunications and tourism are interlinked sectors of enormous importance to the country is to state the obvious. Yet it requires only a brief scan of the coverage of those areas in the newspapers in the last week to become more than a little concerned.
Take Air Botswana and Mmegi's report (9.11.10) that Chobe Holdings has joined a growing list of Air Botswana castigators labelling the national carrier's sub-standard service as the single biggest challenge to the growth of the tourism industry in this country and the Guardian's (12.11.10) that the four and five star rating of the Chobe Groups hotels have been seriously compromised by our national carrier's failure to deliver a remotely comparable service and that the situation had been further exacerbated by the discontinuance of the direct Johannesburg-Maun route by the Civil Aviation Authority.
