The media release issued by the City of Cape Town last week appeared like a PR exercise to make its Tourism, Events, and Marketing Directorate look good after the sudden departure of the Directorate’s Grant Pascoe, former Mayoral Committee member for Tourism, Events, and Marketing.  The Directorate was blamed by Mayor Patricia de Lille for not performing well under Pascoe’s leadership.

Odd too was that the media release was issued by the City of Cape Town, and not by Cape Town Tourism, which has a PR agency, and usually is the spokesperson for the tourism industry in Cape Town.  Whilst quoting Cape Town Tourism CEO Enver Duminy towards the end of the release, its main spokesperson in the release was Anton Groenewald, the Tourism Directorate’s Executive Director, who has never been quoted in a media release before, all communication expressed by Pascoe in the past, even in Cape Town Tourism releases at one stage!   In releasing the statement via the City, the Cape Town Tourism media list did not receive the media statement.  We requested a copy from Groenewald, but have not received it yet, almost a week later!

If the City of Cape Town and Cape Town Tourism had the tourism statistics relating to the period ending February 2014, one wonders why they waited four weeks to release the results, and why they were released the day after Pascoe’s departure!  Ironic is the release of the tourism release on the day when the tourism industry crashed to an unexpected low from 1 April onwards, the worst two weeks the industry has experienced for this period in many years.

The media statement is a sham, and reflects how out of touch the City’s Tourism Directorate is with the real world of tourism in Cape Town:

*    it refers to the end of the tourism season, spanning October to February!  This is an old argument we have had with Cape Town Tourism, when the tourism body attempted to make itself look good in its tourism performance by using a narrow and therefore inaccurate definition of ‘summer’.  The Summer season in the Cape is from October until Easter, and therefore it is not a realistic summary of the full summer performance, which only ends on 21 April.

*   it praises Cape Town’s performance in the five month period until February 2014, due to the weak Rand, Cape Town hosting World Design Capital 2014, and all the good publicity Cape Town has received in the past few months. None of this is researched.  The ‘performance figures’ quoted in the release for accommodation occupancy are not defined in terms of how they were calculated. It provides occupancy information supposedly for the five month period but its table reflects the same figures for 2013 and 2012 ‘full year’!   Performance figures for the V&A Waterfront, Kirstenbosch, Table Mountain Cableway, Cape Point, and Robben Island are presented as a mix of time periods, some for January and February 2014, and others on an annualised basis, making apple and pear comparability impossible!

*   it promises the end of Seasonality, not in using the word, but states that its events planned will ‘entrench Cape Town’s position as a year-round destination’!  This implies that Cape Town is already less vulnerable to Seasonality, while the exact opposite is true, it getting worse winter upon winter!  Groenewald promises visitors attracted to Cape Town hosting the World Design Capital 2014, but there are no tourist events to attract such visitors.  In fact, Cape Town Design NPC PR and Media Manager for World Design Capital 2014, Priscilla Urquhart, specifically told a foreign journalist that the year-long event is NOT intended to attract tourists, a serious PR faux pas!  Groenewald also refers to a new planned arts festival at the level of ‘fringe festivals‘ in New York, Amsterdam, Adelaide, and Edinburgh.

Ironic is that the City of Cape Town’s Tourism Directorate should indirectly lay claim to the ‘Tourism success’, when it has done next to nothing to achieve it since it was established two years ago, taking money from the budget of Cape Town Tourism to create its own marketing body.  Pascoe organised some low key soccer events in the past two years, none of which had any marked tourism benefit.  A large amount of City funds has gone into World Design Capital 2014, once again with no visible tourism benefit to date.  The City of Cape Town should value its tourism constituency by not trying to deceive it with meaningless information and misleading claims about the current 2013/2014 Tourism summer season, before it has come to an end!