A closed runway in Goma and turned-back flights at Kinshasa tested how hospitality prices risk.

By Kanisa Magazine · January 2025

Congo’s travel and hospitality trade lost its eastern gateway and part of its international lifeline in the same week of January 2025. Goma airport shut on 26 January, and within three days Air France, Brussels Airlines and Uganda Airlines had cut Kinshasa services while Ethiopian Airlines and Jambojet stopped flying to Goma. For hotels, restaurants and event organisers the question is how far a sudden loss of seats travels through a trade that sells in dollars.

The currency was not the problem. The central bank’s weekly digest of 29 January shows international reserves of US$6,261 million on 24 January, up from US$6,132 million at the end of 2024, and an indicative rate of CDF 2,868.75 to the dollar that week. Costs held steady while volumes fell, and that is a different kind of shock from the ones the sector has priced before.

Two closures, two different economies

Goma lost its air link outright; Kinshasa lost frequencies but kept its runway.

The Goma closure was total. UNE.CD reported that counters shut on Sunday 26 January and no flight could board passengers, with the M23 movement announcing through its political arm that it had closed the airspace. By 29 January ch-aviation recorded that Ethiopian Airlines and Jambojet had suspended their Goma services, and that the UN’s senior official in the country said travellers were trapped with nothing arriving or leaving.

Kinshasa’s disruption was partial but sharper for business travellers. After protesters attacked embassies on 28 January, Bankable reported that an Air France Paris-Kinshasa rotation via Brazzaville was turned back, Uganda Airlines cancelled its 28 January flights and Brussels Airlines cancelled those of 29 January. N’Djili itself stayed open, and an Ethiopian Airlines aircraft landed at midday on the 29th.

How a seat becomes a room night

Hospitality earns in dollars, but its volume is set by airline schedules and crew rosters.

An airline that drops one long-haul rotation removes a few hundred inbound seats. Two days later that gap appears as empty rooms in Gombe, quieter restaurants and idle drivers. Airlines said their reason was not the runway but safety, and crew changes in a tense city are hard to guarantee, so the capacity returns when carriers judge the city safe, not when the airport reopens.

The loss is concentrated in the most valuable guests: visiting executives, institutional staff and diaspora travellers who pay full rates and book flights close to departure. Leisure demand inside Congo is a thin base by comparison, which is why operators in Goma, with no air link and a front line nearby, face a harder reset than those in the capital.

What the central bank’s numbers say about the cushion

A steady franc and rising reserves meant operators faced a volume problem, not a cost problem.

The BCC digest gives operators one reassurance. The indicative rate moved within a narrow band through January, touching CDF 2,903.44 on 10 January before settling near CDF 2,870 by month-end. Hotels and restaurants that buy imported food, equipment and fuel in dollars did not see their cost base inflate through the exchange rate.

Prices in Kinshasa were calm too. The national statistics office index, reproduced in the digest, put year-on-year inflation in the capital at 11.09 per cent in the fourth week of January. A trade that can plan its costs can afford to hold its prices, and that matters when volumes are the thing at risk.

What an operator should do this quarter

Hold dollar rates, widen the demand base and track airline schedules weekly.

Discounting into a shock rarely brings back guests who cannot get a seat. A better use of the quarter is to reprice nothing, renegotiate flexible room blocks with the corporate and institutional accounts that remain, and build resident demand through weekend packages, conferences and meetings that do not need a flight. Operators in the east should plan on a long gap and protect staff and cash first.

The practical discipline is a weekly watch list of airline schedule notices for Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, linked to a rolling thirty-day forecast of arrivals. When the first carrier announces a return date, the operators with a current forecast will fill the rooms.