Zimbabwe's second largest hotelier Rainbow Tourism Group plans to double its room capacity in the next two years to take advantage of an expected rise in the number of visitors to the region, its chief executive said on Tuesday.

RTG's Chipo Mtasa said the hotel group, which specialises in three-star business hotels but also has luxury lodges in some of Zimbabwe's tourist resorts, was looking to expand into Zambia's Copperbelt region and Mozambique's east coast, areas which she said were not dominated by large hotel groups.

"By focusing on countries that are closer to us, we can grow our base and brand before we expand into the rest of Africa," Mtasa told Reuters.

Mtasa declined to comment on how much the hotel group would spend on the expansion because the company was in a restricted period in the run-up to reporting earnings.

Industry sources estimate RTG, which already has 1 000 rooms, would need to invest up to $100 million.

Zimbabwe has struggled to attract tourists in the last decade as it made headlines with violent seizures of white-owned farms to election violence and political repression to the world's highest rate of hyper-inflation at one time.

Tourist income fell from $360 million at its peak in 1999 to only $29 million in 2008.

But since last year's formation of a coalition government between President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai the situation has improved and official figures show that tourism could be on a rebound with an expected growth of 10 percent this year, up from 6.5 percent in 2009.

By Reuters