Impacts of Political Instability on the Tourism and Hospitality Businesses in Amhara National Regional State, Ethiopia

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of political instability on the tourism and hospitality sector in the case of major tourist sites in Amhara, Ethiopia. Data were collected through the SurveyCTO software. In this survey, 367 respondents and 12 key informant interviewees conducted. Participants from hospitality and tourism businesses were located in key tourist sites including Gondar, Debark, Lalibela, and Bahir Dar. To analyze differences in responses across multiple categorical variables (tourist sites, business types, locations, and business categories) as it’s suitable to comparing two or more independent groups of the hospitality and tourism businesses with non-normal data, the Kruskal-Wallis test was employed. The Mann-Whitney U-test specifically examined to compare the variances in responses between those hospitality and tourism businesses. The study findings indicate that political instability results in decreased revenues, decreased numbers of tourists, shorter lengths of stay, increased mobility of manpower, and increased costs for the tourism industry. This result was valid not only for all major tourist destinations but also for the rest of the country in general, even though the level of impact is different for hospitality and tourism businesses based on their characteristics. As a result of the political instability impact since 2020 in Amhara, Ethiopia, the performance of the tourism industry has declined. Tourism crisis management and recovery marketing strategies for tourism and hospitality businesses will need to be considered in future studies of sustainable tourism development.