Speaking at the Magical Kenya Travel Expo 2026, the airline calls for resilience by design through stronger insurance, health security, and crisis management frameworks
Kelvin Jakachira
Nairobi, Kenya: Kenya Airways, the Official Airline Partner of the Magical Kenya Travel Expo (MKTE) 2026, has today called for Kenya’s tourism sector to strengthen its preparedness for future crises by investing in stronger risk management, health security, and crisis response systems.
Speaking at a panel session aligned with UN Tourism’s World Tourism Day 2026 theme, “Digital Agenda and Artificial Intelligence to Redesign Tourism,” the airline’s Chief Commercial and Customer Officer, Julius Thairu, called for a shift from resilience by experience to resilience by design.
The panel, “Tourism Preparedness and Resilience Beyond Global Crisis,” focused on three systems the sector must put in place before the next disruption: a travel insurance market that serves both operators and visitors, a health security framework that reaches beyond Nairobi into the field, and a coordinated crisis management and business continuity structure that can respond quickly.
“Kenya’s tourism sector has proven its resilience time and again, from post-election violence to COVID-19 to the 2024 protests, largely on the strength of the product and the determination of individual operators,” said Thairu. “But surviving a crisis is not the same as being built for one. The next step is to move from resilience by experience to resilience by design, with systems that strengthen traveller confidence, protect operators and enable faster recovery from future disruptions.”
On travel insurance, Thairu said coverage must shift from an optional afterthought to a standard component of a quality tourism experience, embedded across airlines, online travel agencies (OTAs), hotel websites, and mobile payment platforms. He highlighted Kenya’s mobile money ecosystem as a unique advantage for driving domestic uptake and called for minimum standards from the Tourism Regulatory Authority to ensure customers receive transparent information on available cover before completing a booking.
On health security, he stressed that travel advisories from major source markets can devastate bookings overnight, making proactive engagement with agencies such as the UK’s FCDO and the US State Department critical. He framed health security infrastructure not as a cost but as a strategic investment in destination competitiveness, calling for a public–private financing model that sustains emergency medical response, disease surveillance, and trained personnel without donor dependency.
On crisis management, Thairu pointed to the 2024 protests, when cancellations outpaced any coordinated response, and said Kenya needs a pre-agreed crisis protocol with named roles, approved messaging, designated spokespersons and rapid response mechanisms across government, airlines, hotels and trade partners. He also called for sector-wide force majeure standards and a standing recovery playbook with pre-allocated budgets and pre-approved assets to enable fast deployment of recovery marketing
Reinforcing Kenya Airways’ role as Official Airline Partner of MKTE 2026, Thairu said, “Tourism and aviation grow together, with a strong national carrier helping drive tourism growth while expanded connectivity creates new opportunities for tourism development.”
He described the Expo as an important platform for showcasing the best of Kenya to the world, strengthening trade relationships, and attracting visitors from key source markets, adding that, “Partnerships such as MKTE bring together government, airlines, tourism agencies, hospitality players, investors, and destination marketers to strengthen Kenya’s competitiveness.”
