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Business Reporter
ZIMBABWE has featured among the top countries any first time holiday maker would like to visit alongside Nepal, Maldives, St Lucia, Rajasthan and The Vatican, a survey has shown. This is according to a research conducted on the first trade business day at ITB Berlin 2016, the German Information Centre (GIC).

The Zimbabwe Tourism Authority (ZTA) is participating in the reputable international tourist exhibition with several other operators in the country.

“This comes as a strong rallying impetus to the strong contingent of the Zimbabwe tourism industry attending ITB, those at home to rally behind what at first appeared to be an achievable objective set by ZTA to have attracted over 100,000 visitors by 2020,” said ZTA in a statement.

The tourism agency is leading a delegation of Zimbabwean tourism players from across the board as they try to make further inroads into the German tourism market, and broadly the European tourism market.

ITB Berlin is one of the world’s leading travel trade shows that attracts thousands of participants from Europe and the rest of the world.

In 2014 Europeans alone went on holidays abroad in nearly 70 million city vacations and booked around 400 million overnight stays. Meanwhile, the official preliminary statistics released by the ZTA, which showed Zimbabwe recording a seven percent increase in tourist arrivals from 24,572 to 26,355 have been confirmed by GIC statistics at ITB Berlin 2016.