Uganda Tourism Signs Champions Hockey League Deal to Win Swiss Travellers

Uganda tourism is heading onto the ice. The Uganda Tourism Board (UTB) and Uganda's embassy in Switzerland have signed a one-year partnership with the Champions Hockey League (CHL), a top-tier European club ice hockey competition, to market Uganda to Swiss sports fans throughout the 2026/27 season. It is the latest and most unusual move in a string of embassy-led campaigns aimed at drawing more high-spending European travellers to the Pearl of Africa.

The agreement was concluded in Zug, Switzerland, and announced on 6 and 7 October. It came out of talks between the embassy and Infront, the sports marketing company that holds the CHL's exclusive media and marketing rights. Under the deal, Uganda gets visibility and a series of tourism "activations" across Switzerland during the season, built around its wildlife, landscapes, culture and hospitality. Financial terms were not disclosed, and the partners have not yet published which games, venues or channels the campaign will use.

Why ice hockey, and why Switzerland

The partners say the deal gives Uganda a nationwide platform in Switzerland, reaching sports fans who may never see conventional travel advertising. Robert Marcel Tibaleka, Uganda's ambassador to Switzerland, framed the deal in diplomatic terms. "Sport is a powerful bridge between nations," he said in the announcement, adding that the embassy's discussions with Infront had opened the door to the partnership and that Swiss ice hockey's reach offered a platform for telling Uganda's story.

UTB chief executive Juliana Kaggwa called Switzerland "a strategic market for Uganda", saying sport offers an engaging way to reach audiences across the country. Fadri Holinger, the CHL's director of operations and sport, welcomed UTB as a partner for the Swiss market, while Infront's senior vice president for marketing, sales and services, Michael Witta, said: "Sport can help destinations turn visibility into meaningful engagement."

The approach is not new in African tourism. The sports business publication Sportcal pointed to Visit Rwanda's eight-year agreement with Arsenal, which began in 2018, as the best-known example of a tourism board buying into a sports property to reach fans. Uganda's deal is far smaller in scale, but it follows the same logic: use a sport's loyal following to put a destination in front of people who already travel and spend.

Part of a wider Swiss push

The hockey partnership builds on several weeks of activity by the embassy in Switzerland. In September, the embassy teamed up with Private Safaris, a long-established Swiss Africa specialist that now operates as a brand of the Dertour Suisse travel group, to promote Uganda in Zurich. According to Nile Post, a promotional video began playing on screens at Zurich's main railway station on 1 September, and Uganda-branded adverts started running on the city's trams on 16 September. The embassy said it chose Zurich for its concentration of high-income residents who travel often.

Earlier in 2026, Uganda also sponsored a national pavilion at the FESPO travel fair in Zurich, where 13 members of the Association of Uganda Tour Operators exhibited at a subsidised rate, Nile Post reported. Uganda's embassies in Paris and Copenhagen have run similar public transport campaigns this year, including three Uganda-branded buses in Paris in June.

The bigger picture for Uganda tourism

The campaign lands at a moment when the government is trying to turn record visitor numbers into higher earnings. Uganda received 1.64 million international arrivals in 2025, which brought in about 1.62 billion US dollars in foreign exchange, according to figures reported by The Observer. (See our earlier report on Uganda's record 2025 arrivals for the full numbers.)

The sector is also recovering from a health scare. On World Tourism Day in late September, the World Health Organization and Africa CDC declared Uganda free of the 2026 Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak, The Observer reported, and President Yoweri Museveni declared that "Uganda is open for business, Uganda is open for tourism."

Tourism minister Tom Butime has said the challenge now is conversion rather than awareness. "We must convert impressions into enquiries," he said at the World Tourism Day events in Mbale, where he also pointed to a Shs 567 billion sector budget for 2026/27 that funds global marketing and AI-driven destination tools. Sponsorship deals like the CHL partnership will ultimately be judged on that test: whether visibility in Swiss arenas translates into bookings, longer stays and higher spending in Uganda.

What it means for travellers and operators

For Swiss travellers, the campaign is mainly a prompt to look at Uganda alongside better-known safari destinations. Gorilla trekking in Bwindi Impenetrable and Mgahinga remains the flagship experience, and the Uganda Wildlife Authority's low-season permit rate of 600 US dollars for foreign non-residents applies in November as well as April and May, against the standard 800 US dollars. See our guide to Uganda gorilla permits for 2026 and 2027 for prices, rules and the changes coming in January.

Most visitors need a visa before travelling; our guide to the East Africa Tourist Visa explains the options for combining Uganda with Kenya and Rwanda on a single trip.

For tour operators, the embassy's run of Swiss activity suggests growing demand from a market known for long stays and high spending. Operators who sell to German-speaking Europe may want to watch for the CHL activations over the coming months and make sure their Swiss-facing offers, and their gorilla permit availability, are ready.

Photo: Fabien Perissinotto / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).