The government is now fully aware of the richness of its territory, namely its natural
resources and landscape, and is trying to capture several types of tourism activities such
as environmental tourism, rural tourism, agricultural tourism, eco-tourism, and safari
and hunting tourism. The investment in the hospitality industry is also a key strategy on
the government agenda. The hotel industry showed a positive sign in 2007 growing at
sharp rate of 3%, while bednights grew by 16% to 12,747.6 million Kwanzas (Euromonitor,
2009). Most of the new hotel investments are taking place in Luanda, although the
government is trying to spread accommodation capacity throughout the country.
Despite this growth, much more work is still needed to expedite the development in the
hotel industry. Corruption is the major obstacle against future hotel investments. The
country was rated as one of the most corrupt countries in the world by the anti-corruption
watchdog Transparency International. Angola also suffers from a lack of skilled
employees to properly run the new or existing hotels. The government is currently
trying to allocate funds and scholarships to train people abroad or to import some
skilled labour from abroad to teach them. The government has also introduced a special
programme called ‘hotel escola’, which is an institution where people can work and get