The impact of tourism clusters on the central Namibian coast

Abstract

A rise in adventure travel in the early 1990s through 2019 has boosted the growth of tourism hubs in developing nations and in specific cases such as Namibia’s coastal tourism hub of Swakopmund. SME agglomerations show distinct qualities of tourism clusters effectively meeting the demands of both domestic and international visitors. However, despite the successes of the local tourism industry, tourism in the central coast of Namibia appears to be growing without a policy plan considering the impact industry clusters have on the local and national economy. This research aimed to investigate the existence of a tourism cluster in Swakopmund and to construct a method to measure the contributions of the suspected tourism cluster to the local economy. Using an exploratory mixed-method research design joining agglomeration literature, a historical review, personal interviews, a business count, regional location quotients and a questionnaire survey, the local tourism industry in Swakopmund was determined to be a tourism cluster. Interestingly, factor analysis and ANOVA results exposed strong interdependencies of cooperative behaviour and coopetition between tourism and tourism dependent firms despite motivational responses uncovering destructive business methods of aggressive commission actions and intellectual property theft. Survey findings report formidable contributions to local employment, SME creation and opportunities sustaining the value of a tourism cluster to the local business community. Moreover, the implications of this study add to a lineage of tourism cluster studies in developing nations contributing to future tourism development and maintenance of clustering tourism SMEs in tourism destinations.