Eating out and sleeping over cost 11 per cent more than last June, while one eastern gateway sits shut.

By Kanisa Magazine · March 2025

Kinshasa’s restaurants and hotels were the fastest-rising part of the household price basket in March 2025 after transport, up 11.0 per cent in nine months against 6.4 per cent for prices overall. The country’s new flag carrier was adding domestic routes in the same quarter, while the airport at Goma, the main commercial gateway of the east, had stopped handling flights.

Put those facts together and a pattern appears: demand for travel and hospitality is concentrating where the planes still land, and prices are following.

What the price index says

Kinshasa’s restaurant and hotel index stands at 4.4 times its 2011 level, against 1.8 times for everything.

The BCC’s digest of 26 March reprints the statistics office’s price index for Kinshasa by function, with December 2011 as 100. In the third week of March 2025 the restaurants-and-hotels index read 4,400.7. The overall index read 1,792.1, and food, at 1,519.5, had risen far less. Since the last week of June 2024, restaurants and hotels rose 11.0 per cent, transport 11.4 per cent and the all-items index 6.4 per cent. Leisure and culture rose 4.1 per cent and communications 1.3 per cent.

Since the end of December the restaurant-and-hotel index is up 3.2 per cent, against 2.2 per cent for the basket. The gap is narrow in a single quarter, but it compounds.

Planes, prices and who flies

Domestic air routes make a thin market for business travellers, and thin markets price high.

AeroRoutes’ first-quarter schedule report lists Air Congo services starting in mid-January 2025, using Boeing 737-800 aircraft: Kinshasa to Mbandaka twice weekly from 17 January, Kinshasa to Mbuji-Mayi and Kananga twice weekly, and circuits through Goma, Kalemie, Kindu and Lubumbashi. Kinshasa to Lubumbashi ran daily. These are schedules, not passenger counts, and the digest carries no data on occupancy.

What the schedule does show is a hub-and-spoke network built on Kinshasa. A traveller flying to Mbandaka or Kananga sleeps and eats in the capital on the way, and hotels in Kinshasa are the fixed cost of every connection. A narrow supply of good rooms facing a growing flow of corporate travellers is a standard recipe for faster price rises, though the digest cannot prove that cause.

The gateway that closed

Goma’s airport was out of service from late January, which removed a visitor market.

Trade title ch-aviation reported in its 29 January edition that both Ethiopian Airlines and Jambojet had halted Goma service. It quoted the UN special representative as saying that M23 rebels had declared the airspace over Goma closed on 26 January, and said no flights had moved since. The control of the city and its airport is contested, and this magazine reports only what the sources attribute. The January reports are the latest this article relies on, and readers planning travel should check the current status.

The commercial effect is easier to state than the politics. Lake Kivu’s hotels, restaurants and tour operators lost their airline access at once. Visitors, officials and aid workers who would have stayed in Goma had either to travel overland or to book elsewhere. Congo’s other cities, and Kinshasa in particular, are where some of that demand can reasonably be expected to fall, although no source used here measures it.

Purchasing power and the currency

A steady franc keeps imported costs flat, but menus still reprice.

The franc held. On 21 March the central bank’s indicative quote was CDF 2,845.08 per dollar, near the previous week’s level, while its net reserves series stood at US$6,248 million, about two months of imports. With the exchange rate flat, currency movement does not explain the price rise. It is therefore a domestic story, coming from rents, wages, utilities and food, which tends to be sticky once it appears on a menu.

What operators should do

Price off the Kinshasa index, not the headline, and plan for a hub that keeps its premium.

Hospitality operators and corporate travel buyers should benchmark against the restaurants-and-hotels line, not the all-items figure, since it has run about five points ahead of overall prices since June. Contracts with corporate clients can reference that index directly. Suppliers who feed hotels, from bakers to laundry firms, can expect price pressure to continue as long as air access stays concentrated at a few airports, and the first to build capacity in Kinshasa’s mid-market segment will earn the premium the index is already showing.